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THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 



THE FUTURE OF 
THE NOVEL 

FAMOUS AUTHORS ON THEIR METHODS 

A SERIES OF INTERVIEWS 
WITH RENOWNED AUTHORS 

Conducted by 
MEREDITH STARR 

With a Preamble by 

W. H. CHESSON 



Boston : 

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, 

Publishers. 



•3i 



Printed in Great Britain by Love db Malcomson. ttd ti 
London and Redhili, 



published for the first time in 1911 



[All rights reserved] 



PREFACE 



The majority of these interviews originally appeared 
in the Pall Mall Gazette, and I take this opportunity 
of thanking the Editor for permission to reprint 
them in book form. 

The task of arranging the contributions in an 
order of merit or even according to the popularity 
of the authors would prove a task far more difficult 
than useful. The present order is therefore justi- 
fiably fortuitous. 



I may mention that each interview contains the 
actual words of the author interviewed, and that in 
no instance have I presumed to alter or add to the 
original pronouncement. 



Since the Great Upheaval which began in 1914 
the face of the world has been completely changed. 
And whatever the future may bring forth, we may 
be certain of one thing : we shall never return to 
the conditions which obtained before the war. Litera- 
ture, as well as everything else, is in the melting-pot. 
New developments will arise in every form of art, 
because new ideals will inspire the creative artists 



X PREFACE 

who will build up a new synthesis from the debris 
of a shattered world. 

Under these circumstances, the views of renowned 
authors on the future of the novel will attract more 
than a passing interest, both among the reading and 
the writing public. For the novel has become an 
indispensable feature in the national life, and, as 
such, must inevitably survive. But it is difficult 
to say in what direction it will develop, and for this 
reason the opinions of those who are acknowledged 
masters in their sphere are fraught with an added 
significance. 

Meredith Starr. 



CONTENTS 



Preface, by Meredith Starr 
Preamble, by W. H. Chesson 
Opinions of — 

Maurice Hewlett 

William J. Locke 

Alfred Noyes 

Robert Hichens 

W. L. George 

Frank Swinnerton 

Anthony M. Ludovici 

A. E. W. Mason 

Dr. Arabella Kenealy 

Mrs. Champion de Grespigny 

Rafael Sabatini 

Mrs. Belloc Lowndes 

Mrs. Baillie-Reynolds 

W. H. Chesson 

Upton Sinclair 

Sheila Kaye-Smith 




page 
ix 
17 

29 

32 

34 

39 
40 

43 
46 

49 
52 

55 

60 
62 
67 
70 

73 

74 



Xll 



L CONTENTS 






page 


Marjorie Bowen 


77 


Max Pemberton 


80 


Alec Waugh 


. .. 83 


Gertrude Page 


. .. 85 


May Sinclair 


. .. 87 


Dorothy Richardson 


90 


Bart Kennedy 


92 


Basil Creighton 


95 


Eden Phillpotts 


99 


Anthony Hope 


100 


Constance Holme 


102 


W. B. Maxwell 


106 


J. D. Beresford 


109 


Gilbert Frankau 


112 


Gertrude Atherton 


. . 114 


Kathlyn Rhodes 


.. 115 


Alice Perrin 


. . 119 


Mrs. Dawson-Scott 


122 


I. A. R. Wylie 


124 


Margaret Peterson 


126 


Ralph Straus 


. . 128 


Paul Trent 


. . 131 


Andrew Soutar 


- * 134 


Dion Clayton Galthrop 


. .. 138 


W. E. Norris 


. . 141 


Una L. Silberrad 


. . 144 


Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick 


. . 147 


E. Temple Thurston 


. . 150 


E. F. Benson 


■ . 153 



CONTENTS 




Xlll 


PAGE 


Jeffery Farnol 




. 155 


Gordon Gasserly 




. 157 


John Gournos 




160 


G. Colby Borley 




163 


Edwin Pugh 




167 


Marwin Delcarol 




170 


Charlotte Mansfield, F.R.G.S. . 




172 


F. Brett Young 




■ 175 


Louis Golding 




. 179 


"Lucas Malet" 




. 183 


H. de Vere Stacpoole 




. 185 


Barry Pain 




. 187 


Hugh Walpole 




190 


Thomas Burke 




. 193 


Douglas Sladen 




196 


Sarah Grand 




202 


Fergus Hume 




209 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

PREAMBLE 

By W. H. Ghesson 

Needless to say, I am not here to introduce the 
brilliant gathering who have written and spoken 
their thoughts about the Novel, partly in response 
to an inquiry conducted by Mr. Meredith Starr, 
at the request of the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. 
The gathering does not include all the favourite 
fictionists of contemporary England, but it is highly 
representative of literary success in the fields of 
imagination. Not only has Mr. Starr succeeded in 
eliciting opinion from the famous, such as Mr. Alfred 
Noyes and Lucas Malet (that finest flower of the 
Kingsley artistry), but also from the typical ; not 
only from those who (like Mr. W. E. Norris) have 
contrived to remain elegant and conventional in 
the midst of improbabilities, but also from the ultra- 
modern and the studiously plausible. 

A critic malevolently accused of meandering when 
in truth he is not going the shortest way from A 
to Z, is in a pitiful predicament ; and yet I cannot 
pass by Mr. Starr's list of contributors without a 
few remarks of questionable relevance. The first 

17 



18 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

thought which occurs to me on folding my hands 
reverently before the phantom of success evoked 
by the mere sound of their names is that, despite 
the fact that every competent literary critic is, ipso 
facto, a creator, the world has nothing to offer its 
professional critics of fiction one quarter as good 
from a mercenary viewpoint as falls to the lot of 
a popular storyteller. In the commercial sense of 
the word, there is no such being as a very popular 
literary critic, and owing to hypocrisy, the idolatory 
of " tone," the cult of delicacy, the critic who func- 
tions in a " reputable " newspaper finds that, in 
minding his p's and q's, he has to be pretty careful 
of the rest of the alphabet as well. That urbane 
proverb, Live and let live, sounds again and again 
a knell over unborn criticism, though, in so mixed 
a world as ours, teaching people what and how to 
enjoy is almost, if not quite, inextricably involved 
in teaching them what to eliminate, ignore and destroy. 
Here and there a critic, terribly armed by Minerva 
against duncery like Churton Collins, or clothed in 
sheet lightnings like Chesterton, or a superbly verberant 
Know-all of Art like Huneker, compels even Dulness 
to feel that the man looking intelligently at a deed 
or a dream is sometimes at least as considerable 
as the doer or dreamer. Critics so vigorous and 
inspired cannot be caged in journalism ; their vitality 
flows inevitably into books, and if criticism were 
their only forte they would still achieve fame. But 
there is scarcely a fictionist of commercial value to 
booksellers who has not reason to laugh or cry (accord- 
ing as he is controlled by amusement or pity) at 
the working life of a literary critic living solely by 
his journalistic contributions ; for though such a 
critic print every day a cynicism worthy of La 
Rochefoucauld, a sublimity worthy of Pascal, a 
subtlety worthy of Henry James, no pearl or jewel 
that his lips may drop on the pavement of Grub 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 19 

Street will serve as an impediment to his uneasy 
progress towards Limbo. 

The book's the thing ! A book is commonly secure 
from the fair domesticated maid who lays fires, and 
the fact that even an average novelist brings out 
books gives him a place in the sun rather than a 
place in the grate. True, there is something absurd 
about the prestige attaching to bulk and physical 
separateness. One smiles to reflect that " Dagmar's 
Pink Jumper " by Phyllis Grovvell (assuming the 
existence of such a work) would inevitably appear 
in the general catalogue of our greatest public library, 
whereas if D. Albert Einstein, Signor Gabriele D'An- 
nunzio, President Harding and Sir Robertson Nicoll 
were simultaneously to contribute to a number of 
the Nineteenth Century and After, no member of 
the illustrious quartet would have qualified thereby 
for a reference in that cosmic work. Again I say 
the book's the thing. And since it is the thing, 
how pleasing it is to reflect that the easiest kind 
of book to write is also the one most likely to sell ! 

Money has been called Power : even an obolus 
in a dead man's mouth has been deemed efficacious. 
Certainly a penny dropped in the street causes more 
people to look down than thunder causes to look 
up. This Power one is glad to see in the possession 
of every good writer. It indulges the critic in an 
occasional pair of shoes ; for the novelist it purchases 
a motor car. Why this difference ? 

There is a single answer : Popularity, which is 
another word for love. The only people who love 
critics qua critics, are those whom they helpfully 
or approvingly criticise, but popular novelists are 
loved by thousands whom they have never seen. 

I draw on my experience for two illustrations of 
the novelist's place in the heart of humanity. 
Among the most impressive and convincing con- 
tributions to this book is one by Mr. Robert Hichens. 



20 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

He is probably the greatest living English master 
of what I may term Hot House Fiction. The circum- 
stancial form of his work sometimes attains surprising 
beauty, for he is a cunning artist, and he charms 
by the creation and solution of dreadful mysteries, 
and by the sympathetic exhibition of souls in pain 
and of desires that rum and venery have never found 
the mouths of. " The Fruitful Vine," one of his 
most inspired works, was nominated a few years 
ago for a cheap edition which could only be made 
to pay at the price to its verbiage of a drastic abridg- 
ment. A quarter of a century of criticism published 
in papers, of private memoranda on thousands of 
MSS. had not set me in a position whence I could 
safely refuse the task of pruning the too expansive 
creeper. I, therefore, performed the veritable " hack " 
work required of me, but though I left Mr. Hichens' 
main narrative intact, and was entrusted with other 
abridgments, a talented lady novelist (a friend of 
mine, too !) was heard to express the wish to murder 
the anonymous (involuntarily anonymous) gardener. 
For me, of course, there was a taste of irony in my 
achievement. Infinitely humaner than Procrustes, 
I had nevertheless qualified, like those fearsome 
beings who " make up " a daily paper, for a rhetorical 
link with him, and I asked myself, as I did when 
I turned some of Shakespeare's plays into tales for 
children, if it wasn't ten thousand times more blessed 
to cut down daddy's old trousers into knickerbockers, 
than to alter another man's art at the bidding of 
commercial expediency. 

The sound of Gertrude Page's voice in this book 
is the cause of my second illustration of the power 
of novel-writing to elevate a person above Grub 
Street and the melancholy jealousies and economies 
of " staffs " and publishing offices. In my early 
manhood, she, a girl brimful of dreams of love worth 
loving and life worth struggling in, regarded me as 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 21 

a possible guide to acceptance. Long and meticulous 
were the criticisms I wrote to her on her performances. 
She saw me on a hill and knew not that its name 
was Illusion — the hill that flattens itself. At length 
she qualified for a favourable report by my late 
friend Lewis Sergeant, a man of extraordinary scholar- 
ship and keen perception, whose verdict should 
have been effective in the House where it was made. 
Alas, it was not. The lady whose " Paddy the Next 
Best Thing " has equalled or exceeded the popu- 
larity of Mrs. Hungerford's " Molly Bawn," arrived 
at success by a road of which I saw but the beginning. 
When she was so successful that publishers and 
managers of theatres and cinemas looked at her 
reverently as at a personification of acquirable cash, 
I was, in an interview ungraced by any compliment, 
severing connection with a publisher who had known 
me for thirty years because he " insisted '• on a daily 
attendance at 9 a.m. for less than a pound a day. 
Look on this picture and then on that. The idle 
apprentice and the industrious apprentice have served 
long enough. Let a new Hogarth arise and depict 
the critic and the novelist. 



And now as a critic it behoves me to consider 
what the passion for stories means in human life 
and the development of humanity. There are four 
great forces behind most human beings — aspiration, 
love, appetite, fear. There are two kinds of life 
in which they can operate — the life called real and 
the life of imagination. On that plane of conscious- 
ness called real life, where man is awake, perceives 
cause and effect and accurately foresees the physical 
results of rules, aspiration calls for toil, love implies 
self-denial and fear is more potent than mud to defile 
souls whom it is forced to approach when they yearn 
towards the absolutes of perfection. To realise the 



22 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

ideal, to bring it down from heaven and make his 
hands and feet its instruments, is a task which may- 
well daunt a sensualist, by whom I mean anybody 
whose real life is the history of one or more physical 
appetites. For if a man begin to view his self of 
physical appetites and fear as the substance out 
of which the ideal is required to emerge, he may — 
psychic artist that he has become — seize Pain as 
the analogue of the sculptor's chisel and bid the 
fragments fly. 

Who lets I dare not thwart / would may posture 
all through life (if he be silly enough) in the studia 
of his unborn ideal, or he may go forth and spoil 
his complexion by stupefying pleasures. But he 
can also do this : he can steadily apply himself to 
the occupation of living in successful and happy 
people, saints diademed by their own light, conquerors 
of fear whom no hurricane can blow from rectitude — 
yes, and in people of unascertained foundations 
whose enviable destiny on earth is constantly to 
be addressed as " darling " or " duck " — but always 
in people who have never been born and, to speak 
with strict accuracy, never will be. To live thus 
is to live the life of imagination ; to make people 
live thus is in the power of the greatest novelists, 
but nobody deserves the title of novelist who cannot 
take another person out of himself into an imaginary 
creature. He either contributes to what Dorothy 
Richardson calls " the vast recreation of vicarious 
living " or he is a deceiver. His deceit (if it occurs) 
is hard to prove because there is a large number 
of persons to whom such expressions as " Grecian 
profile," " faultless evening dress," " soft clinging 
material," " drooping eyelashes," " shy glance," 
" dainty lingerie," and even " trim ankle," have 
the conjuring power of Wagner's voluptuous love 
music. On the other hand, a descriptiveness signifi- 
cant of a complete visualisation may be resented 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 23 

and caricatured. There are people who would believe 
me to be merely " swanking " if I were to say that 
the most difficult to read of all Meredith's novels 
(save the unfinished one) is infinitely more alive 
in my imagination than the irritating human poltergeist 
of " A Bad Boy's Diary." Such is the fact, however, 
though the only book by Meredith which I can re-read 
with pleasure is " Evan Harrington " as published 
in Once a Week. " Evan Harrington " can take 
me out of myself ; it has all the captivating qualities 
of imaginative prose as tolerated by its fastidious 
students of Scotland Yard, only requiring more 
definiteness of joy in its close. 

Joy is a word aptly evocative of interrogation at 
this point. Is not the production of some sort of 
joy the best result achievable by a novel ? Mr. 
Bart Kennedy desires fiction to be " kept clean." 
Some one has prophesied the extinction of the 
" dirty " novel. Chaucer and Boccaccio dutifully 
turn in their graves ; while Shakespeare mutters 
" there's nothing either good or bad but thinking 
makes it so." Our modern friends have, of course, 
a salubrious idea at heart — a novel which will not 
depend upon ugliness, bad smells, cruelty, injustice 
for its interest. But this we may be sure of : the 
people of the future will not accept cleanness as 
marketable goods. So if dirt is to go and the last 
" pornophile " is to turn from the shops of London's 
Villiers and Green Street in utter despair, " clean " 
fiction must be more generally enticing than is the 
case now. If, for instance, one wishes to give a 
thoroughly conventional friend's boy a " clean " 
but charming tale of school life, one thinks of Tom 
Hughes, Dean Farrar, Talbot Baines Reed and Mr. 
R. S. Warren Bell. There one pauses. (Forgive 
me, brilliant Alec !) Yet millions of people have 
been to school. The local colour is vivid ; the 
characters are easily made to stand out ; and yet 



24 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

few know how to write a really charming tale about 
a stolen examination paper, a football match and 
a bully's discomfiture. Sad, but true. Asked to 
name really charming stories for modest young ladies, 
I reply, " Little Women/' " Good Wives," " Nellie's 
Memories," and " We are Seven," and if it were 
not for the restraining word " charming " I could 
go on, till a cry of " Mercy ! " would stop the outflow, 
naming dozen after dozen of meritorious and " spot- 
less " books, copies of which might well be nailed 
by superstitious mammas over the doors behind 
which girls, not overburdened by brains and dan- 
gerously disinclined to industry, begin to consider 
how they can use their prettiness. But charm, a 
detaining power, capable of holding greediness and 
hope in suspense so that the destined person is often 
simplified to eyes and ears, requires uncommon 
felicity in the art which would exercise it. O, you 
guilty ones who, with paltry pedantry and a solemn 
desire to make the library " go " with the silver- 
haired butler, have made lists of " the hundred best 
books," expiate your offence by compiling authentic 
centuries of charming books. There are not a few 
who under the thraldom of such a task would " wax 
desperate with imagination " trying to raise the 
readable to the level of the charming. But I insist 
that a charming book can be re-read. It does more 
than appeal to curiosity ; it arouses love, if only 
one's love of fun. Thus, though I do not remember 
meeting Miss Louise Alcott, Dean Swift, Alan St. 
Aubyn, etc., I gladly call on the children of imagination 
whose names are Meg Brooke, Glumdalclitch, Herbert 
Flowers, Mona Maclean, Alexander Hagen, Prince 
Zaleski, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Count Fosco, Mr. 
Pecksniff, Alice Mayton, Aranis, Angela Messenger, 
Nixie Messenger, Adrian Harley, Undine, Francoise 
Macquart, Lord Henry Wotton, Mary Crookenden, 
Captain Kettle, Don Q, Zarathustra, Jenny (it matters 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 25 

not whose), Netta of Goldach, and many others. 
I know what they are and will do, but they have 
a life beyond my curiosity, and deeply as I grieve 
at any persecution of art or sincerity (be it a Zola's 
or a Colenso's), inflexibly as I admire all scrupulous 
realism used for art's sake, I do not think that any 
sane person deliberately retraces the path of a 
curiosity which has been satisfied by mere foulness 
or crime. Yet what is beautiful in a character may 
suddenly become phenomenal, apparent enough to 
astonish and dazzle, because of circumstances as 
dismal as Lear's or Lucretia's. 

A student of fiction will know by now that I am 
not easily disturbed by the morals or manners of 
a book. Like Dr. Arabella Kenealy, however, I do 
sometimes experience as displeasure the effect of 
philosophic materialism upon people and upon art. 
It would, of course, be wrong to accuse our con- 
temporaries of an insensitiveness more generally 
stubborn than that of the populations preceding us ; 
but Dr. Kenealy is right : our reaction from senti- 
mentality has gone too far. No one who notices 
the reign of ugliness over toys (e.g., " golliwoggs ") 
can doubt that some malign force works artistically 
against the charming fancies to which the children 
of the past turned with unspeakable relief after 
Sunday afternoons with Mrs. Sherwood and Hesba 
Stretton. 

Before the sense of my personal debt to fiction 
has quite departed from the reader's mind, I say 
that from time to time fiction which I could not 
confidently recommend to a publisher has left on 
me an impression of living in people quite as strong 
as I obtain from masterpieces. Especially I remember 
a young genius resident in South Africa who created 
a group of female school-teachers, one of whom, 
sensual and goaded by jealousy, plotted to wound 
her divinely gentle rival by exposing her to a brutal 



26 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

outrage. Everybody in this queer novel was alive 
and the saint adorable ; and yet I would rather 
have been a credulous folklorist at midnight uprooting 
a mandrake for the first time than have watched 
the face of my then employer reading such a work 
when it was too late to recall it and not too early 
to pay some of its expenses. Yet if I had been a 
millionaire I should have published it and other 
novels, too, which were vital, just perhaps because 
they were not written for any market but to give 
definite biography and shape to haunting images. 

Here it is well to say that fiction has very much 
less to do with style and elegance of form than some 
critics think ; but it has a great deal to do with 
people, the thoughts which they utter and the feelings 
which excite them. It is true that few people who 
have loved a sunrise, the sea, a star, a cosmic man 
like Byron, a human symbol of Venus, would willingly 
follow through hundreds of pages the petty people 
of Jane Austen's fancy, if it were not for her delicious 
humour, her stylistic felicity. But on the other 
hand, suppose Mr. Thomas Hardy's subterranean 
irony were all he had to charm with, should we not — 
we who believe in good gods and angels, in the life 
of idea as well as in the life of physical sensations — 
avoid his work ? But we love the people he has 
created, people neither stylists nor preachers. Some- 
times, indeed, an author hardly realises the possi- 
bilities of his power to make imaginary people live 
in writing. That was the case (I fancy) with Mr. 
Foster Melliar, the creator of Betty Dewhart. He 
is a prospering novelist almost malgre lui, for he is 
a poet and doomed, of course, to think of style, form, 
abstract beauty, and the cinema and the stage both 
inform him, as they have the very successful Paul 
Trent, that it is not the literature but the people 
and the incidents which make fiction pay. H. M. L. 
Lanark is also a poet and, in novel-writing, a stylist 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 27 

and a psychologist — ingenious, too ; but compara- 
tively few have taken the trouble to enjoy the genius 
for characterisation displayed in " The Lanark Series " 
of short novels and " The Rough Torrent of Occasion." 
" Writers' writers " really exist and are pathetic 
objects, unless their merits impassion a pen of might 
on their behalf. 

While I was engaged on this preamble I discovered 
that Mr. Meredith Starr in collecting the thoughts 
of others had omitted to present his own thoughts 
on the subject of the novel. They are, however, 
well worth hearing, if only for the reason that, to 
write novels of the lofty kind which he would like 
to see in circulation, it would be necessary for writers, 
inconspicuous for personal idealism, to reject the 
easy help of autobiography and to employ the 
imaginative creativeness which Mrs. Belloc Lowndes 
misses in modern fiction. At my request for a state- 
ment, Mr. Meredith Starr uttered these words : — 
" Literary art should not merely excite, but 
exalt, the soul. It should not merely instruct 
or please, but illumine and inspire. It should 
be psychically educative, and, like an Orphic 
magician, should evoke from the soul the rhythms 
of wonder, worship, and triumphant beatitude which 
are cosmic in scope and godlike in essence. I wish 
the novel to mirror the unity of life, or, in other 
words, to show that all possible individuals are latent 
in every man and that each person may ultimately 
identify himself with every living object in the uni- 
verse. Art should give people a foretaste of higher 
possibilities, attainable perhaps in hundreds of thou- 
sands of years. Mona Lisa, considered not only 
as a portrait, but in relation to the symbolic back- 
ground which Leonardo da Vinci gave her, is art 
that appeals to me, for she is representative of all 
womanhood. Lytton's ' Zanoni/ which I have 
been reading for the sixth time, has that quality 



28 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

of rising above the personal and anecdotal and the 
merely amusing which I wish to see in fiction. 
Zanoni, being a cosmic type, is representative of 
every human being, although he functions in the 
novel chiefly as an exemplar of love. I add that 
I am a believer in Nietzsche's dictum that philosophy 
should walk in the* van of art. Artists would then 
avoid the misfortune of reacting from the sublime 
to the ridiculous through failure to understand 
the laws of life. Good art directed by truth should 
have the effect of awakening genius in people. 
In other words, it should arouse the higher potencies 
of human nature." 

I am happy in being able to incorporate Mr. Starr's 
statement in this preamble. It does not conflict 
with my hedonistic, benevolently medical view of 
the novel, yet it is in vivid contrast to it. His novel 
is a clarion ; mine is an anodyne ; his invites the 
birth-throes of the new man ; mine is a peacemaker 
that demands not the price of a Lethean drug. And 
yet our novels might be the same. On this petty 
paradox I end, while cordially recommending my 
readers to learn not less than I have from the brilliant 
novelists who discourse in the following pages. 

W.IH. Chesson. 



MAURICE HEWLETT 

Mr. Maurice Hewlett, in an interview, said he 
thought that the people of the present day were too 
keen on money, and that it might well be said to 
many of the writers of the age, " The thing would 
have been better done if you had taken more pains." 
But they seem to have no time for concentration. 
Life is such a rush. The old authors took two years 
over a novel ; now a writer turns out two books in 
a year. The old authors took a delight in their work ; 
nowadays people have their eyes much more fixed 
upon things which draw them away from their art. 
" An author always gets the readers he deserves," 
said Mr. Hewlett. " It is a great pity that a young 
man of ability should supply a merely popular demand. 
A poet or a writer of romance does not observe any- 
thing unless he wants to ; the idea comes first and 
observation follows. But the novelist proper proceeds 
upon observation. He is always observing ; and 
his noveJ follows of itself. The young men of to-day 
own a divided duty. There is little time to observe 
when you have to turn out two novels a year. And 
they have found out that there is a large public 
which does not care whether they observe or not. 
That is the public which uses novels like drugs. All 
this is temptation to fall short of excellence. They do 

29 



30 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

not select their material properly, nor are they suffi- 
ciently concentrated or sincere. But whoever would 
achieve creative work, must select and concentrate ; 
and, above all, he must be sincere. The difference 
between romance and realism depends chiefly upon 
whether the idea is hatched before the observation 
or whether the observation incubates the idea. 

" I think that the best novels are tending to be 
very short and very concentrated, in the same way 
that a good poem should be concentrated. I do 
not see in England a sign of a novelist of the calibre 
of Tolstoy. I think that realism is settling down 
on novel-writing as well as on the readers of novels. 
The pitfall of the writer of romance is undoubtedly 
sentiment, which can very easily degenerate into senti- 
mentalism, though, of course, you cannot write a 
romance without sentiment. 

" The only novel I have read during the last fifteen 
years which is really written in the grand manner 
is ' The Growth of the Soil,' by Knut Hamsun — a 
really encyclopaedic novel. You feel when you are 
reading it that you comprehend all time and all 
existence — which is exactly what you ought to feel 
when reading a good novel. 

" You must take the trouble to understand things, 
and English people are intellectually and physically 
the laziest people in Europe. The only trouble 
they will take is the trouble to save themselves thinking, 
for thinking is to them a disturbing and distressing 
process. One notices this everywhere : on the stage, 
m the cinema, in fiction, and in the public attitude 
generally — chiefly, perhaps, in the modern newspaper 
which is rapidly becoming a cheap and frivolous 
magazine. 

" In art, the really good work, of course, is the 
work which is good and at the same time popular, 
in the sense of carrying a universal appeal. And 
when you get that, you have everything. 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 31 

" You must remember this : if you take as the 
greatest name in literature the name of Homer, and 
if you ask yourself what Homer's business was in 
writing his epics, you discover that it was to keep 
people awake after dinner. That was what he was 
out for, and he did it. 

" In my opinion,' ' concluded Mr. Hewlett, " the 
only thing that matters is the big thing — to knock 
everybody sideways with a really great thing. The 
people must drug themselves with reading, and if 
they cannot get the good they will take the bad ; 
but if the bad and the good start level, the good will 
always win." 



WILLIAM J. LOCKE 

" The future of the novel is the past of the novel," 
said Mr. William J. Locke, when asked to give his 
views on the changes the novel may undergo. " It 
satisfies the primitive instincts of mankind to be 
told a story. It may be told in a thousand different 
ways, but unless it is a Story it will not survive. 

" Time is the melting-pot of fiction as of every- 
thing else, and if the novel of the future is a novel 
that tells a story, then in that melting-pot the whole 
of the dross will be scummed off and the gold of 
the story will remain for posterity. 

" The mere drab record of the life of an uninteresting 
personality may be of interest to people passing 
through a certain phase of thought and existence, 
but a generation must arise to whom this is a matter 
of no concern. There must be a reaction towards 
romance. Whether this will occur during the present 
state of the world or after the world has been a little 
more reconstructed, one cannot say. Things will 
settle down as soon as the youth of the country find 
fresh ideals. During the war the youth of the country 
have been strung up to an ideal of Victory. They 
have attained it, and the consequences of Victory 
have not been what they have expected. And so 

32 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 33 

we have all the youth of the country groping after 
some fresh ideal, and until they have found it, politi- 
cally, or socially, or spiritually, the world will remain 
in its present state of disorganisation, which is 
reflected in the novels of the younger writers of the 
present day 

" So much of the literature of to-day is static, 
when it ought to be dynamic. It has not got the 
force of life in it. If you look round, you will see 
that those novels of the newer school that have made 
a real appeal to the public are those which possess 
this particular quality — namely, of being dynamic. 
For, after all, if a novel is not a living thing, it is 
naught — just like any other form of art. 

" A thing I could never understand," concluded 
Mr. Locke, " is why the people who call themselves 
realists think that gloom and despair only are real. 
Joy is quite as real as either, yet why is it never treated 
realistically ? The saying of the Frenchman, ' Art 
is a corner of life seen through a temperament,' may 
be true, but it certainly is not true that art is a corner 
of life seen through a microscope. We do not take 
a microscopic lens to our cheese when we eat it. Why 
should we do so with life when we live it ? " 






ALFRED NOYES 

" In my opinion/' said Mr. Alfred Noyes, in the 
course of an interview, " the prose fiction of to-day 
is doing for this generation exactly what the Eliza- 
bethan drama did for the Elizabethans. The Eliza- 
bethans' drama was, of course, written by poets, 
and it has always seemed to me that the best fiction 
of to-day is written by modern minds of very much 
the same quality, though they are dealing with a 
different subject-matter. 

" An American critic, a short time ago, described 
the fiction of to-day as being produced apparently 
by a syndicate, which he called ' British Novelists, 
Ltd.,' because there was so great a similarity between 
the books of a large number of modern writers. But 
this was also characteristic of the Elizabethan period. 
It would be easy to imagine, for instance, that the 
works of Webster and John Ford were minor works 
of Shakespeare. One could point to a modern John 
Ford in Mr. Thomas Hardy, and Mr. Joseph Conrad 
in the Elizabethan age might easily have been the 
author of Webster's ' White Devil' And I think 
it may be said with certainty that the outstanding 
work of to-day is distinguished from the rest by its 
essential poetry, which is not a matter of outward 
form. The best description of poetry is, that it takes 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 35 

the isolated fact or incident and relates it to the whole 
— sets the temporal in relation to the eternal. 

" In one way or another this is done by all the 
outstanding novelists of to-day. Sometimes through 
that particular kind of negation or pessimism which 
is merely a casting off of the temporal for the eternal, 
and sometimes by what I think is the preferable method 
of Shakespeare with his ' cloudless, boundless human 
view.' Apart from an inevitable narrowing of his 
field of vision caused by a certain confusion of art 
with politics, one might say that the method of 
Kipling is the method of Shakespeare. He gives you 
as grim a tragedy as any other writer in the ' Badalia 
Herodsfoot/ but he commits himself to no more 
pessimism than does the author of ' Macbeth.' 

" It has always seemed to me that much of the 
literature of ' rebellion,' in fact, is a protest, not so 
much against forms of government as against the 
very constitution of the Universe whereby the rain 
descends on both the just and the unjust, and that 
such rebellion, therefore, is in a sense a confession 
of weakness. In any case, it is futile. The method 
of Shakespeare never indulges in it and eventually, 
I believe, it is the writers who follow that impartial 
method who will be recognised as our greatest. 

"It is a curious fact that the writers who follow 
what I have called the Shakespeare method have 
a public of quite a different kind from that of the 
John Fords and Websters of to-day. The latter 
are usually followed each by his own class or coterie, 
and their works are usually dealt with as if they were 
chiefly important as social documents. The situation 
is a somewhat paradoxical one, for in spite of the 
propagandist nature of much of their work, they 
are at the same time regarded by their followers 
as more definitely artists for art's sake than those 
who are really concerned, simply and solely, with 
their art. I have not the slightest doubt, for instance, 



36 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

that twenty-five years hence ' Stories in Grey ' 
and ' Here and Hereafter/ by Barry Pain, will take 
their place as the pure gold of contemporary fiction, 
while much of the propagandist work of to-day will 
be forgotten, because either the goal for which it 
fought will have been reached, or its aim will have 
been proved to be illusory. 

" Barry Pain's ' Sparkling Burgundy,' ' The Com- 
monplace,' and a dozen others, are masterpieces of 
the short story that will mellow with time, and are 
equal to anything written by de Maupassant. They 
are also perfect examples of the method of the inde- 
pendent writer (free from any kind of propaganda, 
or social or political prejudice) which I believe will 
emerge from the present confusion of ideas as the 
most important artistically. There are single sentences 
in some of this work that convey a character more 
vividly than whole chapters in many other writers. 
When the actor-manager arrives late for lunch, for 
instance : 

" ' An unexpected rehearsal, my dear fellow,' he 
said to Garth in a clearly articulated whisper that 
carried to every part of the room. ' Royal command 
for next Friday. Quite unexpected. Gratifying, 
eh?' 

" We have the whole character, perfectly, in the 
last two words ; and that is almost all that, in the 
lucid economy of his style, the author devotes to it. 
There is a gallery of similarly vivid contemporary 
portraits in this writer's best work, and it will have 
a far more certain interest for the future than will 
the less central work of most of the propagandist, 
communist, polygamist and what-not work of to-day. 

" There are one or two other writers of whom one 
could make a similar prophecy, and it is a curious 
fact that none of these men has ever been a member 
of a coterie. All have been so independent that, 
frequently, their reviews in the press are to be measured 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 37 

by paragraphs, while even the members of the poetic 
coterie, frantically seeking short cuts to fame for 
each other, usurp columns upon columns in praise 
of their elect. The literature of the future will be 
something very different from what is now promised 
by the coteries. That is quite certain. In fact, 
the coterie system in this country has lowered the 
value of contemporary criticism to a point where 
the independent writer can only keep aloof and laugh 
at the frantic farce. Fortunately, the public is 
rapidly discovering a mind of its own. But I could 
tell you one story of a recent mistake made by the 
leading English critics and meekly accepted by every 
influential journal in London, with regard to the 
work of one of the greatest writers in the nineteenth 
century. The mistake was a point of fact, involving 
both the knowledge and the critical perception of 
those who made it, and it was enough in itself to 
prove the amazing, almost cynical, carelessness that 
has overtaken our literary columns since they were 
abandoned to the coteries. I shall not say more 
than this now, for I shall have more to say about 
it in the near future ; but it was as grave an error 
as would be the acceptance of ' The Chimes ' under 
a new title, as a new work. 

" I believe that the tendency in the next few years 
will be away from the methods of the coteries and 
more and more in favour of the independent writers ; 
moreover, that there will be a re-discovery of the 
principle of art for art's sake, in the finest sense ; and 
also, perhaps, of the beauty of narrative for narrative's 
sake. It is so easy to fool the reader with the pseudo 
realistic and the pseudo analytical. It is so much 
easier to give the subtle reasons for each smile of 
the heroine than to give the smile and the good story. 
Of course, there are half a dozen writers to-day who 
are maintaining the highest standards ; but for the 
most part at present we are in the midst of an orgy 



38 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

of easy methods—free verse, free music, free painting ■ 
and fiction, too, free from all the laws of order and 
proportion. There will emerge, I am sure, a greater 
care for form and a more energetic will to conquer 
rather than to evade the difficulties of literature " 






: 



ROBERT HICHENS 

When asked to give his opinion on the future develop- 
ment of the novel, Mr. Robert Hichens replied (by 
letter) :— 

" I think the duty of the novelist is to have a 
story to tell and to tell it clearly, with directness 
and force. 

"I do not think mere studies of character are 
enough to make a satisfactory novel, though many 
people seem to think so. Often one finds only a 
vague and nebulous story wandering through clouds 
of psychology. 

" I believe the successful novel of the future, as 
the successful novel of the past, will be the novel 
that tells a human, interesting story, in which 
character is shown in action, not merely in endless 
conversations. 

" All men and women love an engrossing and natural 
story which moves along to a predestined and un- 
forced end. A novel of this kind will never be oui 
of fashion/' 



39 



W. L. GEORGE 

When asked to make a statement on the subject 
under discussion, Mr. W. L. George said he 
thought that a clear distinction should be made be- 
tween the novel of entertainment and the novel of 
significance. 

" This distinction seldom is made," continued 
Mr. George. " In all the literary histories I have 
read I found Walter Scott (an entertainer) undifferen- 
tiated from Trollope (a critic). The importance of 
this lies in the ' revival of romanticism ' which has 
been discussed by romantics. Romanticism may 
revive, we may soon read another ' Catriona ' or a 
' Fortunes of Nigel/ and I shall read them with 
delight ; indeed, the romantic novel may revive, 
but merely as an entertainment : it will not mean 
anything. 

" When I say that a novel does not ' mean ' any- 
thing, I imply that certain kinds of novels do mean 
something. Those are the novels which criticise 
life, while the romantic novels merely embroider 
life. The novelists who criticised life should stand 
forth from the ages — Stendhal, Flaubert, Dickens, 
Tolstoi, Butler, Turgenev ; wide is their noble array ; 
thev did not limit themselves, and their voice is 
familiar though their tongue be dust. 

40 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 41 

" The critical tradition is not dead ; Mr. Thomas 
Hardy, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Wells, M. Anatole France 
sustain it. Though, during the last ten years, many 
have deserted it, attempted to confine the novel 
to impressions of sense-pictures which the paint-pot 
and the film produce better ; though many a novelist 
has restricted himself to an analysis of character 
(generally his own) ; though the faithful of the 
tradition have been sneered at as sociologists, propa- 
gandists ; though they have been called out-of-date — 
they are not disturbed. 

" Romanticism may revive ; it existed with Mile, 
de Scudery in 1660 ; the photography of Zola may 
revive ; the symbolism of Mallarne may revive. But 
that which must be revived never had life. That 
which persists is alone eternal. The critical novel 
is a form which persists ; when M. Anatole France 
tells us that art is nature seen through a tempera- 
ment, he means to include in nature the conditions 
of man, his place in the state, his customs, his laws, 
and above all the changing face of his world. Theories 
of housing have in literature a place equal to that 
of hyacinths. 

" The critical novel is the novel of significance ; 
it will hold its place in the future as it has in the past, 
discussing social conditions and remaking the minds 
of men. Already to-day several of the younger 
novelists, particularly the women, are abandoning 
impression and emphasising psychology. That will 
go on. But there are those who think that in the 
present world, in its mood of immense disturbance, 
when kingship, marriage, capitalism, faith, and even 
freedom are subjects for discussion, the young men 
and women who join in the debate will avoid these 
questions and give no stories of cafe and sword, as 
of love on the rolling wave .... This is 
childish. 



42 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

"To me the novel is the showman of life ; it's 
business is to hold up the mirror to the period. The 
future will not lack hands to seize that mirror and 
compel man to view himself in human society." 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

" It seems to me that the long series of chronicle 
novels is on its last legs," said Mr. Swinnerton, " that 
people do not want it any more, and that they have 
made up their minds that it is a dull article. The 
novel of incident has always been and it always will 
be with us, but I do not see any sign at all of the 
growth of any really romantic fiction. My friends 
do not seem to be moving in any such direction, 
nor do I find among the manuscripts which I have 
read professionally any indication of a romantic 
trend. This does not mean that it is impossible, 
because developments must come from the younger 
writers, but my own belief is in an increase of stories 
in which the principal characters are followed for 
a long period but in less detail than has been the 
case with the chronicle novel hitherto. The basis 
will be realistic, but the books will not be realism in 
the sense hitherto accepted. 

"I do not believe that the 'cradle to the grave' 
novel will continue, but it does seem as though we 
might be going to have a return to something like 
the novel of the eighteenth century, of which the 
prime example is probably ' Tom Jones.' Whether 
one likes his work or not, one must realise that Mr. 
Compton Mackenzie is heading straight back for the 

43 



44 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

eighteenth century, and other novelists are tending 
to do the same sort of thing in a less copious manner. 
That is to say, there will be a great movement in 
the direction of a definite or plain tale, but the whole 
thing will be coloured by pictures of manners of a 
lighter or more humorous description. 

" The impulse, I think, will be in the direction of 
a humorous rather than a romantic synthesis, because 
we have been having a great many extremely serious 
novels, and it might be against seriousness in fiction 
and the pre-occupation with absurd little solemnities 
that the reaction will come. To say this might imply 
that all our novelists are going to attempt the same 
thing, which would be ridiculous. I only suggest a 
movement which it seems to me that novelists, who 
already have some standing, may be making. It is de- 
finitely of the novel of social life that I am thinking. 

" Up to the present, we have had social novels 
in which the lives of the protagonists were swamped 
by details of their milieu. The novel I see is essentially 
heroic, in the sense that the principal characters will 
stand out against and be heightened by their environ- 
ment. From environment we cannot possibly get 
away, because it means so much in modern life, 
and, therefore, in the typical life which novelists 
are bound to portray. But we do not want our 
novels to be all environment, any more than we 
can stand such an obsession in our own daily lives. 

" I have been looking to find a great arrival of 
young novelists as the result of peace and the sharp 
break caused by the war, but I do not see it. The 
novelists who have recently emerged are all men 
of my own generation, and the young ones are just 
beginning to abandon the writing of poetry. Whether 
they will turn to the novel or the play, I cannot imagine, 
but judging from their poetry, I should think that 
their novels would not be very helpful. 

" Before the war it was said that this great purge 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 45 

would produce a reaction toward romance. Now 
the same idea is recurring. I believe the wish is 
father to the thought ; but when one uses the word 
romantic, one is immediately in a difficulty. It is 
one of the words that ought to be destroyed. Each 
person who uses it believes himself to be the owner 
of the only accurate definition. In fact, I believe 
that ' romantic ' is only used as a word to scourge 
that horrible thing ' realism.' But there can be 
no romance without realism, and no realism without 
romance. 

" Accordingly, it is perfectly safe to say that the 
novel of the future will be both realistic and romantic. 
It will only be healthy if it is both. It must have 
definite relation to the recognisable life of some part 
or parts of the community, and it must also be heroic 
in the way I have suggested. I think it very likely 
that we shall see the sentimental interest put in its 
place and a good deal more concentration upon 
career and life outside the few months of amorous 
ecstasy with which so many novels in the past have 
dealt. I do not mean to sneer at the love story — 
far from it — but I think that a greater unity will 
be achieved if it can be regarded as an element in 
the lives of the characters, rather than as their 
justification." 



ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI 

" I think that, in an ascending age, the classic of 
yesterday becomes the degenerate of to-morrow," 
said Mr. Ludovici. "In a descending age, the de- 
generate of yesterday becomes to-morrow's classic. 
People too readily accept the endorsement of posterity 
as a demonstration of an artistic claim to merit. But 
if posterity is inferior to the age which condemned 
the artist originally, obviously the admiration of 
posterity is worth nothing, and a man who finds 
his works increasingly admired as he grows older, 
should ask himself whether the age is getting better 
or worse. It may be the increasing vulgarity of 
his contemporaries which alone accounts for his 
increasing popularity. Therefore, to outline the 
probable character of a work of art of the future 
is to grope entirely in the dark. For if man continues 
degenerating, modern standards will be too far above 
his head to be comprehended. And if he becomes 
more desirable than he is at present, modern classics 
will appear as so much rubbish. 

" If life becomes fuller for the individual, there 
is no doubt in my mind that the novel will suffer 
almost complete evanescence, because vicarious ex- 
periences can only be interesting to the mass of man- 
kind when there is a good deal of suppressed or un- 

46 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 47 

expressed passion about. Even to the psychologist 
who is now learning to study his science very much 
more by observation by than introspection, the 
novel will be, in an age of fuller lives, more or less 
superfluous. 

"As a rapid demonstration of this view of the 
possibilities of the novel, let it be remembered that 
at the present moment in Europe where, owing to 
climatic and other conditions, life is fullest in countries 
like Italy and Spain, or in pre-war Syria, novels are 
not nearly so greedily read as in England, France 
and Germany, where large sections of the population 
undoubtedly suffer a good deal of suppression which 
forces them to find satisfactory vicarious experiences. 

" This of course does not apply to the rare creative 
novel where new emotional or intellectual possibilities 
are for the first time brought to the notice of the 
reader. This kind of novel, by enriching life, would 
necessarily belong to the mechanism which supplies 
a fuller existence. According to that principle, seven- 
eighths of the novels of the present day would be 
ruled out. 

" In the event of the future witnessing a re-definition 
of values, the novel, like every other form of art, 
might serve the purpose of presenting these values 
in their application to life. In this sense, they would 
be what is glibly called by the average critic didactic. 
My novels, for instance, are always called didactic 
— not because they differ in method from any other 
novel, but because their characters in conversation 
express opinions. Since, however, these opinions 
are frequently at variance with those the reader 
has been used to, their doctrinal content, by becoming 
unusually apparent to him, leads him to suspect 
they are more didactic than the novel he has just 
put down by a writer with whose views he entirely 
agrees. 

" If, as I cannot help feeling, the commercial and 



48 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

industrial organisation of society is tending towards 
intensification and elaboration rather than gradual 
decline, then in all highly industrialised countries like 
Germany, England and America, the demand for 
vicarious living will increase, and the novel of the 
future will meet, in the description of good food, fresh 
air, scenic beauty, passion and so forth, all the unsatis- 
fied desires of modern humanity. 






A. E. W. MASON 



" I consider that it is impossible to classify ten- 
dencies in novel-writing," said Mr. A. E. W. Mason, 
when interviewed. " I think that one particularly 
good book which seizes the attention of the public 
will make the public look out for other books of a 
similar kind. I think, too, that authors who have 
been impressed by the qualities of one particular 
book, say its method, or its period or its spirit, may 
be struck by an excellence that is new to them and 
start working on the same lines. And after these 
will come the deliberate imitators. The imitators 
will fade away and really make no difference one 
way or another. The best examples will go on 
living. 

" The completeness with which the author realises 
his ideas and the skill with which he can present 
them, between them are the two causes of permanence 
in literature. There is a passage in ' La Cousine 
Bette ' where Balzac expounds the doctrine of author- 
ship. The author, according to him, should keep 
on writing, not necessarily because he will always 
turn out something very good, but because when 
the really fine idea comes to him, he will m the hist 
place know it at once, and in the second, be able 



50 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

to present it to you who do not know it in its full 
beauty. 

" The author and critic alike who upholds any 
particular school or method to the exclusion of any 
other, as so many are inclined to do to-day, simply 
convicts himself of a very complete ignorance of 
the literature of his own country. ' In my father's 
house there are many mansions.' That is as true 
of literature as of other things. 

" Time brings in its revenges. A dramatic critic 
who for years has treated all but the high-brow plays 
as hardly worth consideration, is now producing a 
melodrama of his own in New York, with aeroplanes 
and all the rest of the melodramatic paraphernalia. 
It is so easy to pronounce a distinct judgment that 
this or that particular work is right, but if that judg- 
ment includes the view that every other style or 
method is wrong, then the judgment must of necessity 
be unsound. For instance, one man will hold that 
the clear Athenian style of Bacon is the only good 
style, but if that man comes up against a volume 
of de Quincy with its tremendous corridors of prose, 
he will, if he is reasonable, understand that he has 
put forward a judgment that the evidence of literature 
confutes. 

" A novel must not be dull. Unless the author 
has incident in his novel, his novel must be very 
incomplete, for if he holds, as all novelists will hold, 
that the exposition of character is his theme, it is 
only under the stress of events that character is 
really tested or exhibited. And the author who 
will give you two or three hundred pages of analysing 
is asking the reader to take too much on trust. The 
reader will want to see whether these characters 
about whom he is told so much really behave accord- 
ingly. Action is the test of character. 

" The reason why I think the novel makes its appeal 
both to the author and the reader of to-day is its 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 51 

flexibility of form. One still sees an effort on the 
part of this or that author or critic to insist upon 
the preservation of the unities. The novel is really 
an artistic escape from the unities. It aims by its 
length and by the fact that it is not a pictorial repre- 
sentation of life, at a wider field than is possible under 
the more rigid form of the drama. It is the child 
of the epic, not the offspring of the theatre. 

" Stevenson's ' Wrecker ' was much criticised be- 
cause it roamed all over the world and was therefore 
said to be deficient in form. But as a fact it was 
fulfilling the real reason for the existence of the novel 
as a literary form. 

" This effort to give arbitrarily to the novel the 
same limitations as those which of necessity hamper 
the play, comes, I think, from France, and is one which 
novelists should resist. All the corners of the world 
are really very close together nowadays, and it would 
be absurd for the novelist to be bounded in his choice 
of a theatre of action. 

" I think, too, that the novel should or must appeal 
to the imagination. It should suggest ever so much 
more than it says, and if it can awaken in the reader 
some vision of horizons only half guessed at before, 
then it is achieving its work. 

" I should say to a young author, ' Never forget 
that in most, if not all, great permanent imaginative 
work, a really good story based upon the eternal 
passions is at the bottom of it.' 

" Regarding the future, I look forward to a time 
when man will accept all schools of literature and judge 
only the particular example by its own intrinsic 
merit. He will have to have a standard of judgement, 
but one wants the standard to be the truth of the 
book to itself and in itself, rather than it should fit 
into a sort of Chinese puzzle of literature." 



DR. ARABELLA KENEALY 



"The modern craze for Feminism, athletics, sports 
and politics," said Dr. Kenealy, in an interview, 
"is destroying the emotional element in women, 
so that they are ceasing to be interested in love- 
stories, romantic passion, or human ideals. 

" Every normal woman possesses in herself the 
masculine potential that enables her to produce male 
offspring. This is a sort of racial trust-fund which 
she may draw upon and develop as masculine powers 
in herself precisely as a mother might realise monetary 
investments held in trust for her sons. But if she 
does this, her sons will be effeminate and physically, 
mentally, or in other ways, inferior in type. For 
she will have expended, in developing in herself and 
in cultivating masculine ideals, the potential virile 
energy of manhood invested in her for transmission 
to male offspring. 

" The lack of emotion and romanticism in women 
must increasingly destroy the vogue for the novel. 
Already, this is being felt in the modern trend of 
fiction. Novelists are giving less and less prominence 
to the love element, so that the novel is rapidly 
changing its form. It is becoming more analytical, 
more a study of character, an exposition of politics, 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 53 

of ethics or opinions. It is no longer a story written 
round the love-episode of a human life. Romance 
bulks small, its bearings upon action are belittled; 
it is presented in the terms of playful comedy, of 
cynicism or burlesque. 

" I think that the main interest of the novel should 
centre wholly in the love-episode, all the other interests 
being merely accessory. The emotions roused by 
love in the persons of the story, and the influence 
of these on character and destiny, are the true theme 
of fiction. Politics, ethics, travel, points-of-view and 
so forth, should be presented in other forms of 
literature. 

"As an illustration of the attitude of the modern 
woman towards love, I may mention that recently 
at a theatre two comely young women sitting next 
to me jeered at and derided every expression of 
sentiment or other rcmantic indication in the play. 
This was no doubt an extreme case, but it is one 
of many similar experiences I have had and is sympto- 
matic of the changed attitude of women to a 
sentiment once all-potent in their lives. These young 
women were not scorning and mocking from spite 
because love had not come into their lives, but, 
being athletic and masculine of type, they were in- 
capacitated by temperament from experiencing love, 
and were vindictive against an emotion denied to 
them ; just as a blind man might be angered in the 
presence of that which others were enjoying as a 
beautiful and inspiring scene, but which to him was 
blank and void. 

" I think that the higher evolution both of literature 
and of humanity must be along lines of ennobling 
and intensifying the love-passion and increasing its 
importance as a transfiguring emotion. But the 
present trend is to destroy it, by diverting woman's in- 
terest into less vital and fructifying channels. Men may 
be sure that a Feminist cult which has toppled them 



54 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

from that heroic pedestal on which natural women 
delighted to set them and which has reduced them 
in the eyes of modern women to the level of ' old 
bean ! ' or ' pal ! ' is not moving on the lines of 
progress." 



MRS. CHAMPION DE CRESPIGNY 

" So far, I think that the psychic element in the 
modern novel has done more harm than good," 
said Mrs. de Crespigny, " for the reason that so few 
writers have really studied the subject, but have 
merely used it as a peg to hang a plot on. They 
have almost always taken the unpleasant side, and 
even when they have read up the subject, if they have 
done so merely with that object, it always fails to 
bring conviction. They have not taken the psychic 
side seriously — have not realised that it presents 
a very abstruse study from the scientific point of 
view ; and I think that when they do realise it, as 
I am sure they will, the psychic element will play 
an enormous part in the future of the novel, and I 
sincerely hope that novelists will shoulder their re- 
sponsibilities in this connection. 

" I also think the novel will alter from the man's 
point of view, and that men will consider literature 
and humanity much more from the woman's stand- 
point than has hitherto been the case. Women have 
always, for obvious reasons, studied men more than 
men have studied women. And for this reason the 
understanding of men's moods has until quite lately 
been woman's main line of defence, when the ' strong 

55 



56 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

right arm/ to put it figuratively, has been all that 
counted. The only way a woman could achieve her 
destiny was through a subtle knowledge of the other 
sex, whereas man never really troubled to make a 
study of women ; there was no particular reason why 
he should. Now, I think he must. And this will 
have a great effect on the novel of the future. 

" There is one great difference between men and 
women : A woman will take a set of attributes or 
qualities, place them on a pedestal, and fall in love 
with them ; then when the man comes along she 
will endow him with all those attributes ; that is 
to say, she idealises him. Whereas a man falls in 
love with a woman and takes it for granted that 
she has all the attributes of a perfect being just because 
he is in love with her. 

" I want to see the serious novel lead public opinion. 
The pen has always boasted of its power, but as a 
matter of fact it has been a servant — as far as fiction 
is concerned — since it usually tries to give the 
public what it wants. I want to see it lead public 
opinion on to higher levels, and I don't think it will 
ever do that so long as it preserves the present note 
of pessimism and the glorification of negligible things. 
I think writers have a very great responsibility in 
being messengers and I think that they ought to 
derive their inspirations from higher planes and to 
bring into the world a general note of optimism, 
beauty, and high aspirations." 

In an article in " The Nineteenth Century and 
After," for March, 1921, entitled " Ideals in Fiction," 
Mrs. Champion de Crespigny wrote concerning the 
novelists of the present day : — 

" There is no sign of decadence in the quality of 
talent or workmanship. Force of diction, certainly 
of touch, vividness of presentment and colour have 
never reached a higher water-mark than to-day. 
Why, then, should so many of our forefront writers 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 57 

devote their unquestioned talents and imaginative 
conception to the wholly squalid side of existence ? 
Why dwell in detail with — in some cases — an abandon- 
ment of common decency, on little trivial incidents 
in everyday life that have in themselves no importance, 
no genuine interest, no particular lesson to teach . . . 

" To dwell on meticulous description of the purely 
trivial, of unpleasant everyday incidents which civi- 
lisation has taught us to ignore, is a different matter. 
With some it passes for strength, but it is not strength. 
It is merely a photographic presentment of a negligible 
incident with no great emotions behind it, no strong 
forces hinted at, no background of unconscious appeal 
to stimulate the brain by its reflection of finer senti- 
ment — merely a bald incident much better kept out 
of sight. What amusement or benefit from any 
point of view is to be got out of a detailed description 
of somebody's sick headache ? — or a morbid probing 
into some unsavoury disease ? — or the unpleasant 
ritual of the dentist's chair ? That it is the truth, 
is no answer. Of course it is the truth, but a truth 
it is in no way fruitful to dwell upon. It is a truth 
that a man of untidy habit, with a beard, eating 
thick soup is an unpleasant spectacle, but it is not 
the least interesting or instructive to visualise it. 
There is nothing of value behind that sort of thing ; 
it is a mere expression of the morbid taste of the 
day brought into being by the depression and conse- 
quent lowering of vitality engendered by the unavoid- 
able facts of war. 

" That is the active danger of pessimism in all its 
forms. It lowers man's vitality, his power of facing 
life. It hinders evolution of the brain and character 
by robbing him of the resilience that enables him 
to stand up again and again to adversity and dis- 
couragement. The ultimate expression of pessimism 
is suicide. The bearers of messages — not always 
on the surface, but conveyed rather by results — 



58 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

through art and literature have great responsibilities ; 
to them much has been given and of them much will 
be expected. The dissection of dustbins is not the 
only road to truth ; the faithful portrayal of the 
contents may show great power of observation, an 
interest in rotten cabbages and broken eggshells ; 
it may be very clever, but should the object of a 
book be to advertise the cleverness of the author, 
or to help and ease humanity on its rough road ? 
Is the cleverness of the author of very much moment 
in the scheme of things ? Is it more exhilarating 
to see on the wall the study of a tin pan with the 
brushmarks as they should be, or a picture that for 
the moment lifts one high above squalor and the re- 
membrance of sordid surroundings, infusing into 
the day's work the optimistic reflection that the 
world we live in is still beautiful ? 

" Complaints have lately been made that whereas 
the public will spend half a guinea or more on a seat 
in the theatre for the evanescent pleasure of an 
evening, they refuse to spend seven or eight shillings 
on a book which they can keep for ever. But if a 
book whenever they dip into it presents to them a 
side of life they would rather forget, why should 
they wish to keep it ? To beautify the commonplace 
is of course essentially the mission of art, but to 
leave it commonplace is to do what the world can 
do for itself. In speaking of a modern book someone 
remarked not long ago, in referring to a meticulous 
description of an unpleasant form of disease, ' The 
mere thought of it gives me a feeling of physical 
nausea ! ' The truth no doubt — nothing but the 
truth, but neither stimulating nor, except to a morbid 
imagination, at all interesting. 

" There is no question of ability in the world of 
letters at the present time. Such names as Gals- 
worthy, Conrad, Hugh Walpole, Sheila Kaye-Smith, 
May Sinclair, and a score of others, are in themselves 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 59 

a guarantee of fine workmanship and vivid colour. 
It is only necessary to compare the work of thirty 
or even twenty years ago with present fiction to 
realise an increase of power and virility in the popular 
novelists of to-day. Side by side with the modern 
writer, the favourite novels of the early part of this 
century and the end of last — always excepting such 
outstanding examples as Hardy, Meredith, and a 
few others that will remain classics — give a general 
impression of corners rounded, a want of sharp outlines, 
of directness of manner, rather as though the marks 
of the graver's chisel had been softened with sand- 
paper. With the unquestioned force of the writers 
of to-day is it not possible for the pen to justify its 
claim to power and no longer follow where it should 
lead ? Can it not lift public opinion and the popular 
taste from levels of pessimism and dustbins into 
something nearer the skies, and forget to be clever 
in the effort to help humanity through the slough 
of a disciplinary evolution ? " 



RAFAEL SABATINI 

" The achievement of realism should be the aim 
of every novelist," said Mr. Sabatini, " no matter 
what the genre in which he elects to work. But at 
the same time it is necessary to bear in mind that 
a writer of novels is not a reporter, nor need he be 
a chronicler of trifles, and that before his work can 
possess any real value it must contain a story supplied 
by his imagination. In the unfolding of this he 
employs realism to impart to it the movement and 
colour of actual life. In other words, he must never 
forget that however desirable a quality realism may 
be, it is to be used only as the means to an end, and 
never as the end in itself. 

If I insist upon a fact so self-evident it is because 
the world of art is troubled to-day by a school of 
unimaginative and arid performers who abhor and 
denounce the story in literature, the melody in music 
and the subject in painting. This school has its roots 
in over-educated sterility. It extols the manner — 
which it has acquired in grammar school and uni- 
versity — above the matter, whose production depends 
upon mental qualities beyond acquisition. It is a 
school that carries self-assertiveness to aggressive 
lengths, and compels attention by the noise it makes 
with the facility of all things hollow. 

60 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 61 

" But not all its noise can succeed in permanently 
distracting the world from the basic fact that the 
matter is all, and the manner a detail. Where the 
creative faculty is absent, no amount of laborious 
chronicling of minutiae in literature, no combinations 
of harmony in music or lavish use of colour in painting, 
can ever produce a work of art, great or little. It 
is better to invent a great story and set it down 
crudely than to exploit the treasures of language 
for dazzling verbal combinations that relate nothing. 
Not that even this is commonly achieved. It is, after 
all, the great stories, sounding deeply into the emo- 
tions, that find for themselves almost instinctively 
the force and glory of beautiful expression. The 
imagination that can conceive greatly, rarely fails 
to discover the language that will do it justice. 

" The so-called ' realist ' — by which I mean the 
disciple of the school to which I am alluding — fails 
of his own avowed object because he crawls with 
his nose to the ground, intent upon discovering that 
which those who walk erect have overlooked. He 
describes each blade of grass seen at close quarters 
as if it were an oak, and every puddle as if it were 
an ocean; and he sneers at the fools who waste them- 
selves in writing of the mountains on the horizon 
and beyond it, when here, under their very feet, if 
they will but stoop to see, are such lovely worm-casts 
waiting to be described. 

" In spite of them, the future of literature will 
pursue the lines upon which it has evolved throughout 
the past. Romanticism will remain safely and firmly 
enthroned, and will never lack for ministers and 
subjects/' 



MRS. BELLOG LOWNDES. 

" The future of the novel is bound up with the 
future of the creative element in literature generally/' 
said Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. " Into that future we 
can only peer dimly, guiding ourselves as best we 
may by the past and observing the movements and 
tendencies of the present. 

" I think no honest person can deny that the 
creative element is playing a less and less important 
part in the fiction of to-day. I can only think of 
one unquestionably great writer now living with whom 
the creative element is supreme. I mean Thomas 
Hardy. The novelists of the present day seem almost 
to disdain this creative power as old-fashioned, and 
their work becomes either photography or autobio- 
graphy, often both. The first and greatest aims 
of every writer of fiction should be beauty and truth, 
and not a few of the moderns have made pictures 
of their own lives and circumstances which are both 
true and beautiful. If, as has been said, ' Art is life 
seen through a temperament/ they achieve ' art.' 
It is when they leave what is to them safe ground 
and attempt work of pure imagination that they 
generally come to grief, much as a clever photographer 
might fail if he suddenly tried to paint. 

" I am probably one of the very few critics and 

62 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 63 

writers who think it impossible to tell to-day what 
is likely to survive in English literature. The works 
of imagination written in the past which were destined 
to enduring fame were thought very little of by the 
critics and casual readers of their day. The great 
master and precursor of our finest English prose — 
I mean Daniel Defoe — was regarded by his contem- 
poraries as a venal journalist who, between hiring 
himself out first to one and then to another political 
patron, tossed off such stories as ' Robinson Crusoe ' 
and ' Moll Flanders ' to turn an honest penny. 

" In France, the Abbe Prevost turned out in- 
numerable dull romances which none of his more 
cultivated contemporaries regarded with anything 
but contempt. Yet his ' Manon Lescaut ' has now 
been for over a hundred years assigned by every 
type of French critic and reader an unique place 
as an imaginative study of the human heart. 

" In our own time, if there was one novelist who 
was held in contempt and in kindly derision by all 
the more serious critics of his day, it was Anthony 
Trollope. Yet in spite of his large and, from the 
creative point of view, uneven output, he is the one 
writer of his time who is steadily growing in public 
estimation. Someone once said that it required a 
man of genius to find another man of genius out. 
The one exception of the flood of good-humoured 
depreciation which overwhelmed Trollope in his own 
lifetime and in which, by the way, he himself was 
quite willing to join, was the opinion of Nathaniel 
Hawthorne. 

" I would like to quote another example. I am 
old enough — or young enough — to remember the way 
in which the novels of George Gissing used to be 
reviewed and spoken of on publication in ' the best 
literary circles.' His novels were variously described 
as gloomy, painful, morbid, dull, and his writing 
was declared to be lacking in distinction. 



64 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

"To go back to the man who is to be the greatest 
of them all and who, fortunately for the world, is 
still with us, Thomas Hardy. Mr. Hardy himself 
told me some years ago that he had left off writing 
fiction because of the way in which his last novel 
' Jude the Obscure,' had been reviewed by the critics 
and by those readers whose opinion counted with 
the public. 

" I have sometimes thought what an interesting 
and amusing symposium could be composed were 
a group of well-known critics to put down now their 
honest opinion as to what, say, six books of the last 
thirty years will be still read a hundred years hence, 
from 1900 to 2020. 

" The truth is that every generation, almost every 
decade, has its literary fashion and fashions of the 
moment. I remember in the early nineties a witty 
lady's remark : ' Oh, Meredith, what crimes are 
being committed in thy name ! ' Original writers — 
I do not necessarily mean great writers — always enjoy 
that which has been described as the sincerest form 
of flattery. For one thing it is much easier to imitate 
a difficult and contorted style than it is to write 
really fine plain English. A great writer uses realism, 
symbolism, Dorothy-Richardsonism (if I may coin 
an expression), just as a great painter uses the colours 
on his palette. The measure of his success is shown 
— if we go to bedrock — in the extent to which he 
has created real characters instinct with the breath 
of life. I do not say that I think this mysterious 
vivifying power differentiates good art from bad, 
for to do so would be to condemn, ever since imaginative 
literature came into being, the vast bulk of it. The 
power of imparting the breath of life to an imagined 
character is the rarest of all the writer's attributes. 
The only prose writer of her day who had it, with 
the exception of the mighty Scott, was Jane Austen. 
In this connection may I recall the strange case of 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 65 

Balzac, perhaps the only French writer who has been 
truly compared with Shakespeare ? Balzac, for the 
most part, wrote a poor, mean, involved style. His 
marvellous gift of imagination, his puissant power 
of creating not a group or even a crowd but a whole 
generation of human beings who all stood on their 
own feet, talked in their own language, lived, loved 
and suffered in their own individual ways, while 
reluctantly provoking a certain measure of recognition 
from his contemporaries, did not compensate, as 
far as the ' Romantics ' were concerned, for his 
obvious defects. Yet which of the ' Romantics,' 
with the exception of Victor Hugo, has in any sense 
survived ? Balzac is more living to-day than he 
was in the thirties and forties of the last 
century. 

"As to the best method to produce fine literature, 
an author's best method must surely differ in each 
case. Personally, I consider that the less ' cleverness ' 
he brings to his work, the more likely he is to produce 
a permanent contribution to the literature of the world. 
I go so far as to say that cleverness is the bane of 
the modern imaginative writer. To every would-be 
young novelist I would say : ' Be good, dear man, 
and let who will be clever.' Lest I be misunderstood, 
I would like to explain that by ' Good ' I mean good 
in the sense of turning out good, sound, human stuff, 
though even then, one comes back to the vital fact 
that, pace obstinate old Carlyle, genius has never 
been a question of taking pains. Genius gets there 
somehow by a path he himself could not retrace 
if his life depended on it. Whether he does his work 
as Blake did, under unfortunate material difficulties 
and with the shadow of insanity more or less over 
him all the time, or whether he pays £5 a year to 
a groom to call him at five every morning and then 
turns out 250 words every quarter of an hour, as 
Anthony Trollope did for three hours every day 



66 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

before starting out on his hard, fatiguing labours 
as a high post-office official, it matters naught so 
that the stuff created be real flesh and blood, and 
recognised as such by succeeding generations of real 
men and women." 



MRS. BAILLIE-REYNOLDS 



Mrs. Baillie-Reynolds wishes to state that the 
remarks that follow are simply those of an avid reader 
of fiction, and that she is talking entirely from the 
reader's standpoint and not from the author's. 

" There are two outstanding characteristics that 
I notice with increasing force in all the best fiction 
that is turned out to-day," said Mrs. Baillie-Reynolds. 
" The first is the almost total decay of imaginative 
power, and the second is the prevalence of a horrible 
false sentiment which takes the form of finding nothing 
interesting which is not also more or less disgusting. 

" There is a pretence of intellectuality in all this 
work, but as a matter of fact, the school of fiction 
that is now taking the lead, the school which is getting 
all the serious reviewing, is not really intellectual at 
all, but will be found, if carefully analysed, to consist 
merely in a series of sense-impressions which resolve 
themselves ultimately into very little more than an 
intensive study of sexual appetites. 

" I saw a book by a new author reviewed only the 
other day for its profound thoughtfulness. Procuring 
and reading it, I found only elaborate descriptions of 
the way in which warmth, sunshine, flowers, rich 
food, pretty scenery, soft cushions, fruit in silver 



68 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

dishes, combine to titillate the senses to the point 
of sex-awareness, or sex-craving, the existence of 
which is supposed to justify any surrender to animal 
instinct. 

" Even in books which do contain other ingredients 
and better work, there is one feature which I own 
I find deplorable, but which is growing to be almost 
universal. They are all exercises upon the one theme 
that chastity is not a matter of principle, but merely 
of personal preference. 

" Mr. Bernard Shaw has succeeded in persuading 
the half-educated that there is no difference between 
right and wrong ; and the name of Freud, which is 
supposed to stand for psycho-analysis, stands really 
for the process of reducing everything in the world 
to terms of sex. 

" Our modern system of reviewing is doing much 
to increase the evil. Editors are tending more and 
more to place the reviewing of fiction in the hands 
of those who themselves write fiction. This is a 
wholly vicious arrangement, and that for two distinct 
reasons. The first reason is that a writer will be 
guided by his personal preferences. He or she will 
select for favourable notice only such books as are 
written on certain lines. I know, almost for certain, 
when I take up certain journals, whose work will 
be noticed and whose work will be ignored. Either 
you must write the kind of work this particular novelist 
happens to fancy ; or — here is the second danger — 
you must yourself be a reviewer of fiction as well 
as an author — and thus a person to be placated. 
' You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours ' is largely 
the motto of to-day's reviewing. 

" The ultimate indictment which I bring against 
the fiction which does get the serious reviews nowa- 
days, is, however, not so much that it is unimaginative, 
not that it is sensual, not even that it is (as I think 
it) dull. 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 69 

" It is, quite plainly, that to me it is false. False 
to life, false to type, false to reality. 

" I have said, on many platforms, that the gulf 
between realism and reality is as wide as that between 
spiritualism and spirituality — than which I can say 
nothing stronger. 

" I accuse this modern fiction of being unreal. It 
omits completely that aspect of life which makes life 
to me a real thing. It takes no count of the hereafter. 

"It is all written from the outside, though it lays 
such violent claims to introspection. It is wholly 
materialistic. Such is its confusion of thought that 
it makes no distinction at all between the passion 
of lust and the virtue of Love. 

" I remember that Miss Evelyn Underhill once 
spoke of a little street arab as having his outlook 
bounded ' at one end by the Crystal Palace and at the 
other by a policeman.' The outlook of the modern 
novelist is at present bound on the one hand by a 
sex intrigue, and on the other by the tomb. 

" If anyone tells me that this is not as a fact the 
national outlook at the moment, I can but reply as 
Ruskin did to the people who said they did not like 
mountains — by ' telling these grovelling persons that 
they are wrong.' 

" To such a period of taste there must succeed a 
sharp reaction. The revolt is bound to come. Soon 
it must occur to some young genius that to succumb 
to temptation is as easy as falling off a roof, and 
that there must be more interest in watching someone 
climb, than in seeing them always rolling downhill. 
So, in the fine words of Lewis Rand : 

" ' I, with a thought like a gonfalon furled 
That waits for the hour when the bells shall be 
rung, 
Sit pondering the gleam on the brow of the world, 
Flashed from the fields that for ever are 
young.' " 



W. H. CHESSON 

" In trying to imagine the future of fiction," wrote 
Mr. Chesson, the well-known critic, " one should 
start with a precise idea of what fiction essentially 
is. 

" If we define it as an artificial method of providing 
the sensation of excitedly living in or with others, we 
cannot be far wrong. Whether our fiction be 
* scientific,' detective, evangelical, cynical, political, 
or romantic, whether the aim of the writer be to 
sugar a pill, present a reform bill to the unassembled 
parliament of desultory readers, or simply to coax 
them along paths of dreamland, the vitality of every 
novel is that of people seen and heard in the mind 
of the reader. 

" Granting, then, that novels are read because 
they create illusions of interesting people, the future 
of the novel depends mainly upon two factors : first, 
Will or will not something supersede the novel ? ; 
secondly, In what way can the novel evolve ? 

" The first question it is safe to answer in the 
negative, while allowing that cinema and talking 
machines in collaboration may, by devices conceivable 
since the telegraphing of pictures became possible, 
simultaneously regale Hodge in his country cottage 
and Wilfred o' London in his metropolitan flat. For, 
after all, one picks up a novel anywhere. 

70 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 71 

" My hope is a bird divinely credulous of eye and 
stout of wing, but it does not quite see the average 
man enjoying the perfection of theatrical illusions 
while reclining in his bath or waiting his turn in 
the Probate Office at Somerset House. 

" At the present time no one expects to see the 
average person making intellectual capital of his 
involuntary leisure. If that were so — if, as he waited 
for a train, one man was building thought-forms of 
success a la Prentice Mulford, and another learning 
Italian or (perchance) the King's English — what a 
glowing sight a great railway terminus or even Hammer- 
smith Broadway would be to the spiritual eye ! 

" But no, the average human being is a would-be 
sipper of honey, uneasily conscious of a higher self 
beckoning ; and the novel is not only, in one form 
or another, his pastime, it is actually his nepenthe, 
by means of its heroes and ministering angels, its 
moonlight and limelight, its cynicism and optimism, 
its whetting of curiosity and discreet appeals to 
the passion that ruins rosebuds while it is life at the 
root of the rose. 

" The novel has a future right enough until the 
right man and the right woman are always together, 
and even then the right woman may have some 
reason for reading fiction to an unduly ' practical ' 
being. 

" Admitting, then, that the novel is safe unless 
the resources of human satisfaction are lavishly 
increased, what would be the nature of its evolution ? 

" In the drama we can distinctly perceive the 
result of an evolutionary process without going to 
art as primitive as the graceless illustrations of early 
chivalrous romances. 

" It would be absurd to call the art of Euripides and 
iEschylus primitive, but we cannot read their tragedies 
without at once perceiving that mere words and the 
sound of them enjoyed a prestige some hundreds 



72 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

of years B.C., which was not theirs after a ' practical ' 
public issued the hideous command, ' Cut the cackle 
and come to the 'osses.' 

" There remains the question : What are the 
'osses ? In other words, What is it that the public 
asks of drama, of fiction ? The answer is immediate : 
The sensation of vivid interest in flesh and blood in 
motion, not a sensation of what events can do to 
stimulate the tongues of rhetoricians or philosophers 
or poets. 

" To the vast majority of novel readers, a kiss, 
an elopement, a divorce, are interesting though the 
heavens fall, so long as the celestial bodies do not 
fall on them. For them the novel has evolved enough 
which brings them into the closest contact, possible 
for such a medium to obtain for them, with the objects 
of their curiosities and desires. 

" I do not think that war or the sufferings of the 
unemployed make any difference in the general taste 
in art. But populations are so enormous that even 
particular publics are sometimes very large. For 
instance, the public for such men — thinkers and 
writers of genius — as H. G. Wells, M. P. Shiel, Bernard 
Shaw, Algernon Blackwood, is very large, yet it is 
not the general public, for these men are very far 
from the ideal of that public. 

" The public wants the tale without the ' cackle/ 
A waiter turned novelist should be a real ' best seller.' 

" To conclude. I think the novel of the future will 
be the nearest thing to a meal of care-obliterating 
sensations." 



UPTON SINCLAIR 



Mr. Upton Sinclair replied by letter to my inquiries 
as follows : — 

" I can only venture a hope, and that is that the 
novel will cease to deal exclusively with the exploiting 
classes, and will devote itself more and more to the 
useful members of society. 

" Also I hope that it will gradually escape from 
the spell of the sham ethics of privilege, and will 
come to deal more and more with the realities of life 
and the actual facts of the relationship of men with 
one another. 

" I realise that these last words are capable of a 
double interpretation, and I should be willing to 
accept both interpretations ; that is, I would be 
glad to see the novel deal less exclusively with the 
mating period of man and woman, and more and more 
with other human relationships." 



7* 



SHEILA KAYE-SMITH 



When requested to give her opinion on the future 
of the novel, Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith said : — 

"I do not think that any modern development, 
like that of Miss Dorothy Richardson, will survive 
as a separate expression in literature : it will only 
survive in so far as it influences the main stream of 
novel-writing. 

" Gradually the author, as commentator and god, 
is becoming merged into his own creation. 

" The value of new movements does not lie so much 
in themselves as in their effect upon the main stream 
of literature ; they are not really fundamental but 
are chiefly concerned with technique. The great 
interest shown at present in psycho-analysis and kindred 
subjects is only a passing influence which will leave 
its trace without causing any revolution. 

" Each age has its main expression. The novel has 
been the chief form of expression since the days of 
the great Victorian writers. How long it will continue 
in this foremost position I should not like to prophesy. 
Poetry and the drama have occasionally shown signs 
of coming back into their own, or it is possible that 
some new form will evolve out of the novel, just 
as the novel itself evolved out of the prose romance, 

74 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 75 

and the prose romance in its turn from the poetic 
romance, and so on back to the epic and the allegory. 
The Rig Veda is possibly the ancestor of ' The Old 
Wives' Tale.' Of what ' The Old Wives' Tale ' shaU 
be the ancestor, who can say ? 

" But the development of the novel is sorely hampered 
at present by the conditions of the publishing world. 
The high cost of production involved by high wages, 
high paper and binding prices, etc., means that a 
publisher cannot afford to launch a book unless he 
is sure of a large sale. This state of affairs has a 
threefold effect on literature. It limits the publication 
of books to authors of (1) superlative merit, (2) obvious 
' selling qualities,' and (3) established reputation. The 
first, of course, is all to the good. One could not 
quarrel with the present state of affairs if it meant 
only that bad and mediocre work was excluded. 
Unfortunately there are also the second and third 
classes of writers, who are safe to reach their 5,000 
copies sale, either owing to some special interest 
attached to their works — a topical subject, perhaps 
an unsavoury one, the portrayal under a thin veil 
of some well-known character — or owing to the 
fact that their names are well known to the general 
public, who will buy their works with the same sort 
of confidence as it buys a trusted brand of cocoa 
or whisky. 

" Both these classes do little good to the novel. The 
first makes for what is merely passing and meretricious, 
the second tends to formality and repetition. Well- 
known writers tend to repeat their successes, and 
the body of literature becomes anaemic for want of 
fresh blood. 

" The publisher and the author are not really to 
blame for this. One may imagine that it is the 
former's duty occasionally to take risks for the sake 
of talent, but it would be difficult to prove his obliga- 
tion. He is a tradesman and he must consider his 



76 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

firm. Nor can one blame the author of average 
position for not risking his sales, and possibly his 
publication, by some new and startling variation on 
the theme his public has come to expect. The blame 
partly lies with the public itself. If people would pay 
8s. 6d. for a novel with the same readiness as they 
pay it for a dress-circle seat at a theatre, or even if 
they would make it possible for the libraries to buy 
more largely by paying an increased subscription, 
instead of insisting that the modern library shall 
continue at practically pre-war rates, then they 
would give a chance to that interesting class of writers, 
who, without being geniuses or likely to become 
popular, yet have a vital contribution to the evolution 
of the novel. We want more ' first novels ' on the 
market, and a keener interest in them on the part 
of both the public and the critics. 

" There is a great danger at present that the novel 
may share the fate of Association football and become 
commercialised. That would probably mean the end 
of it as a force in literature, and its future rests not 
only with the novel-writers but with the novel-readers, 
who have it in their power to decide whether it shall 
continue in the main-stream of literary progress, or 
stagnate in some backwater till its dullness and its 
rankness make it necessary to rid the world of it. 
We are nowhere near anything so bad as that at 
present, but in considering the future of the novel 
it is just as well to look far ahead." 



MARJORIE BOWEN 



" The future of the novel surely depends on the 
strength of its own vitality," said Miss Bo wen, " and 
the vitality of any creative work depends on the 
amount of imagination it possesses, or impulsive 
fancy, or inherent passion and emotion, and the 
power of expressing these which we call genius. 

" Without this, or at least a touch of it, all cleverness 
and industry are useless, and the novel can only survive 
as a living force if it continues to be the means chosen 
by people of genius to express themselves. It is 
more than possible that they will seek other mediums ; 
the novel has become too popular, too easy, too 
debased, too much discerned, for it to greatly attract 
a rare or choice spirit. Almost anyone can write a 
semi-autobiography, filled by the sordid details of 
everyday life, and most people can jot down some 
experience of their own coloured by some emotion 
more or less sincerely felt — for the form of the novel 
is very loose and there is a very large public willing 
to read, as a passing diversion, any work which 
deals with things that have come within their own 
experience, if these are put forward with any startling 
dictum or daring turn of speech. 

" The insatiable curiosity we all possess about 

77 



78 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

ourselves ensures a certain public even for the most 
indifferent of novels. 

" But where among these huddled crowds of works 
of fiction that come and go from the library shelves 
does one find the touch of imagination, of genius, 
the hall-mark of the creative artist ? 

" Exact workmanship, astonishing ability, deft 
management of perilous themes, keen observation — 
these are common enough ; but only once, now and 
then, do we find the real thing — the touch of the 
divine, the glimpse of the Godhead. 

" ' Wuthering Heights ' is probably worth all the 
novels written by women ever since the death of 
Emily Bronte — and yet by this steady flood of medio- 
crity it has been almost entirely swamped and sub- 
merged. 

" The danger of the modern novel seems to me to 
be this violent trend towards realism — so-called. Of 
course there is not any such thing as this ' realism.' 
The word used in this sense — a photograph of a Dublin 
slum — is no more ' real ' than Michael Angelo's statue 
of the Duke of Urbino. Zola is not more true to 
life than ' The Fairy Queen/ but this violent reaction 
towards depicting the sordid, the commonplace, the 
ugly, the usual, in itself a good thing in as far as it 
revolted from the academic falseness of the so-called 
' romantic ' school, (here again it is a misnomer — it 
was not ' romance ' but merely bad work), has now 
gone too far and will, if unchecked, kill all that, from 
the time of Blandello, has been worth while in 
fiction , 

"As in painting the revolt from David and Ingres 
has finally resulted in the eccentricities of Ricasso 
or Matino and the intelligent, balanced mind turns 
in disgust from both, so a sane judgment must be 
equally wearied by the meandering of a Lytton or 
the ramblings of — any of our ultra-modern novelists. 

" The novel requires the strong, the emotion, beauty 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 79 

of presentment— imagination— ' the little more ' than 
ordinary life. 

" It should be loyal to truth, yet touched by the 
glow of fancy, faithful to the depicting of ordinary 
humanity, yet opening the door on to realms that 
are not of this world. 

" This quality is rarely met with in Anglo-Saxon 
novels, and calls to mind several examples from 
recent continental fiction. Henri Voudoyer has this 
quality of pure imagination touching and trans- 
figuring everyday life— as witness that wonderful 
book, ' Les Permissions de Clement Bellin,' and so 
has Grazia Deledda, as exemplified in her storv 
' La Madre.' y ' 

" I regard both these books as models of what 
novelists should strive for if their novels are to survive." 



y 



MAX PEMBERTON 



" Fiction is the art of telling tales," remarked Mr. 
Pemberton. " In this connection it must be observed 
that the great adventure story writers have always 
emphasised the heroic. I think that the heroic is 
still as necessary in fiction as it was formerly. The 
heroic is the essence of adventure. Probably, on 
the whole, more permanence has been obtained by 
embodying the heroic than in any other way. In 
1 Madame Bovary,' for instance, you have got a 
woman striving against the destiny of a particularly 
monotonous life, but in that woman you have the 
heroic quality, because she is striving after the great 
things which belong to a world outside her sphere. 
In my opinion, the greatest novels in the French 
language are ' Madame Bovary ' and ' Cousine Bette.' 
" I am one of those who regret — and am not afraid 
to say so — the disappearance of the ' make believe ' 
in which the old masters revelled. I regret the im- 
possible people of G. P. R. James' ' Horsemen on 
the Fabulous Hill.' While I have the most profound 
admiration for the really great realistic novels — like 
' Madame Bovary,' ' Cousine Bette,' ' Germinal,' and 
those of Thomas Hardy (perhaps Hardy above all) — 
the so-called ' psychology ' of our own day seems to 

80 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 81 

me mostly unimaginative twaddle. Young men write 
about impossible sexual situations and, having no 
invention at all, fall back for their quarry upon the 
baser reports in the daily papers. This, if you please, 
is called ' psychology,' and we are asked to believe 
that there is something great in this kind of art, 
and that it is revolutionary. No doubt, the present 
interest in real psychology is exceedingly valuable, 
and ultimately may influence us all enormously in 
our judgment of human motives, but I do not think 
it has actually so far been of much use to the novelist, 
and I very much doubt if any man writing to-day 
has really made a close study of the very science about 
which he talks so glibly. I happen to have done 
so for reasons quite apart from my work, yet I cannot 
observe, at present, how the knowledge I have acquired 
is going to help me, unless I am to make my books 
in future mere medical treatises. 

" We have, in my opinion, far too little romance 
nowadays. There is no great creative art. No man 
invents for us a ' Robinson Crusoe,' a ' Don Quixote,' 
a ' Musketeer ' or a ' Lady of the Camelias.' The 
reader of to-day can rarely pick up a volume and 
discover a world different from his own in which 
he would like to live. In the view of the new school, 
it would be quite wrong to create such a world for 
him, since none such exists, and all that man may hope 
for is to witness the dying agonies of the lady who 
has taken the wrong turning. This cheery literature 
I find everywhere, and it is called ' great art.' 

" I wonder if there is a man with courage enough to 
say that, in the main, it is flapdoodle which will be 
swept away by posterity like the dead leaves of autumn. 

" We must get back to the endeavour to invent 
stories. A story is largely a contest of will. Drama 
results from the clash of opposing wills. And unless 
we recover the power of invention in which the great 
writers of the past excelled, we shall lose all per- 



82 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

ception of what fiction really is. The fiction of the 
present day, when it is not a medical treatise, is a 
pursuit of the obvious. People are married, divorced, 
and put into a novel. The novelist gets eight and 
six, and the innocent party to the divorce gets re- 
married in the Savoy Chapel. 

" About twenty-five years ago I was told by a 
prominent theatrical manager of the day that there 
would never again be a drama of the ' cape-and-sword ' 
variety, and within two months at least half a dozen 
' cape-and-sword plays ' were being performed success- 
fully at the leading theatres. 

' The romance revival, which is now due, will be an 
extraordinary force. When the reaction does come 
at last, it will come with a sweep which will carry 
everything before it. A promising sign in this direction 
is the success of plays like ' The Wandering Jew,' 
and J. M. Barrie's ' Mary Rose.' But it may take 
ten years for the reactionary tide to reach its full 
strength." 



ALEC WAUGH 

" During the last fifteen years the English novel has 
been under the influence of Romain Rolland's ' Jean 
Christophe,' " said Mr. Alec Waugh. " A big man 
often has a bad effect on his disciples, and I think 
Romain Rolland has on his. He has started the form- 
less, plotless novel that begins with a fairly minute 
analysis of adolescence and then gets lost in a photo- 
graph of the period without much action or develop- 
ment of character. 'Jean Christophe' has made a 
lot of people think there is no need to tell a story, 
but it is rather interesting to note that ' Jean Chris- 
tophe ' itself contains the finest proof by example 
that the story is the highest point dramatic narrative 
can reach. For Rolland has himself written in ' Jean 
Christophe ' one perfect story — the Sabine episode, 
which stands out perfectly clear when the rest of 
the book becomes blurred. It is far and away the 
finest part of the novel and proves the superiority 
of a good story over a good study of social conditions. 
Social conditions are after all transient, but a story 
deals with human instincts and affections, and is 
universal. A story like ' David and Bathsheba ' can 
never grow old. And the Sabine incident is the only 
part of ' Jean Christophe ' that will be of any interest 
to the people of 1980. 

83 



84 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

"It is much easier to describe the clothes that a 
person is wearing than to reveal the mind of the 
same person. And a study of social conditions is 
usually a description of the clothes that men and 
women are wearing at a certain date and does not 
reveal universal emotions of individual men and 
women. Francis Brett Young's story, ' The Tragic 
Bride,' is far more likely to stand the test of time 
than his careful panorama, ' The Black Diamond.' 

" There has been a great deal of discussion about 
the work of Miss Dorothy Richardson, but good though 
it is, I do not think it is likely to prove more than a 
very small by-path in English fiction. The fact that 
it is a by-path makes it none the less interesting. 
Miss Richardson is doing a very small thing as well 
as it could possibly be done, but her methods of the 
analysis of impressions could only appeal to a small 
number of writers. One cannot imagine a writer with 
a big mind and a big range being attracted by them. 

" A good deal is said on the subjects of realism 
and romance, but after all the two are very often 
labels and nothing more. Gautier, for instance, would 
probably be called an idealist, and Maupassant a 
realist, but their view of life was similar and they 
were probably inspired by the same motive, namely, 
a sense of disenchantment. In Gautier it took what 
is commonly called an idealistic form. In ' Made- 
moiselle de Maupin ' he gave a picture of what he 
would like life to be, although he knew it was very 
different and never expected it to be much else. He 
wrote out of a dissatisfaction with things as they are. 
Maupassant wrote out of the same feeling, but he 
relieved his dissatisfaction with a picture of things 
exactly as they are. One might say that Gautier 
and Maupassant walked along the same road together 
for a long way and then parted at a turning — but it 
was the same road for both of them and it is hardly 
possible to divide them." 



GERTRUDE PAGE 



" It seems to me," said Gertrude Page, " that the 
future of the novel must be influenced to a great 
extent by the price of the novel. I think that the 
price will keep up, and that therefore fewer and 
fewer novels will be published. And those that are 
published will have to give the reader something to 
carry away. 

" If the price remains high, it is probable that the 
public will become more and more discriminating in 
what they buy. They will choose a book from which 
they can garner some thought or some point of view 
which it will give them pleasure to retain in their 
minds. 

" One hopes devoutly that there will be a little 
more laughter in the novels of the future. I attribute 
my own success very largely to the fact that my readers 
say to me : ' Your books cheer me up so. I always 
read them when I have a fit of the blues.' 

" This is more significant in view of the fact that 
the general reading public are not as a rule very 
partial to the novel about a country they have never 
seen. After ten years of hard work, my publishers 
always implore me to write about Rhodesia. This I 
attribute largely to the laughter and the homely 



86 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

situations, coupled with the deep thoughts one gleans 
from the open veldt. 

" Most of the situations I describe are drawn from 
life, though my characters are made up from many 
varying personalities. 

"It is rather an interesting point that, though 
I made my name through Rhodesia, and my publishers 
thereafter urged me to write about Rhodesia, ' Paddy 
the Next Best Thing ' and ' The Great Splendour,' 
the one Irish and the other English, have beaten the 
Rhodesian sales. This, again, is due to the gaiety 
in the books, which appeals to the British public, 
together with a little of the sadness which is inseparable 
from all human existences. 

" Although the prices are likely to remain high in 
the first instance, I have great hopes that the day 
may come when we shall see the old paper- 
covered sixpennies back again. These were the edi- 
tions that reached the workers who could afford a 
sixpence where they cannot afford two shillings. 
Failing this, I hope that all employers of labour will 
endeavour to help their employees to provide libraries 
for themselves. 

"It is sometimes complained that the reading 
public only buys trash, but as long as such books as 
' The Choir Invisible,' by James Lane Allen, continue 
to sell year after year in enormous numbers all over 
the English-speaking world, we may feel sure, I think, 
that the soul of the public is tuned aright. 

" I also regard it as a promising sign that there 
is such a growing demand for spiritualistic literature. 
One would like to hope that as many people as possible 
will seek out the truth for themselves, instead of 
being content with second-hand opinions — probably 
derived from some soul of narrow vision. 

"It is very wonderful to think how the literature 
of the future may be influenced from the other side/' 



MAY SINCLAIR 



Miss May Sinclair expressed the opinion that one 
of the most interesting developments of the psycho- 
logical novel is the method employed by James Joyce 
and Dorothy Richardson ; the method, namely, 
of proceeding from one consciousness, and seeing and 
feeling everything through that consciousness, the 
author never adopting the attitude of God Almighty 
as he used to do in the ordinary traditional novel. 

" This method," said Miss Sinclair, " has its limi 
tations, which perhaps those who use it best realise. 
That is to say, you are confined to one consciousness, 
you share its prejudices and its blindnesses, you know 
no more of the other people in the book than it knows, 
but you get a much more vivid and real presentation 
of that particular character's life than you would 
by standing outside it. 

" There are ways of circumventing these awkward- 
nesses. All the time the author naturally does know 
more than his character, and he must present things 
so that they appear both as they really are and as 
they appear to the consciousness of his one subject. 

" It may be said that this method could only be 
applied to one kind of novel — the novel of the one 
predominant character. It certainly remains to be 

87 



88 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

seen whether it will be successful in dealing with groups 
of characters all equally important. The difficulty 
in this case will be to get an aesthetic unity ; but it 
will be worth trying for. 

" It has been objected that a novel of action could 
not be written from this standpoint, but that alto- 
gether depends on the kind of consciousness you start 
with. If you take the consciousness of a man of 
action, you will have all his actions in his conscious- 
ness — the only place where they immediately and 
intimately are. The method — whatever else may be 
said for it — provides a more thorough-going unity 
than any other, for there is nothing more fundamental 
than the unity of consciousness. 

" I see no end to the psychological development 
of the novel on these lines, but the method might 
not lend itself, for example, to certain forms of comedy. 
The reason is that the very essence of the comic is 
the incongruity between things as they are and things 
as they appear to consciousness. 

" The whole point of the comedy of ' The Egoist ' 
is in the difference between Sir Willoughby Patterne, 
as he appeared to Clara Middleton and George Mere- 
dith, and Sir Willoughby as he appears to himself. 

" And to uphold this difference the author must be 
the absolute spectator of the two Willoughbys ; he 
must, in fact, be the absolute outside spectator of his 
own creations. That is the difference between comedy 
and tragedy. Comedy allows you to be slightly more 
diffuse, less concentrated, less intense, to play round 
and round your subject. 

" It can be said that all this may be true, and that 
there is nothing very new in it. The novelists who 
know their business — the great novelists — have always 
worked from the inside of their characters, and have 
always been one with them, but they have also always 
been the outside spectator. 

" And that attitude, so far as it is perceptible to 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 89 

the reader, interferes more or less with a direct present- 
ment 01 the subject. You are aware of the author 
all the time. This is especially so with the analytic 
novel of the past. The modern novelist should not 
dissect ; he should not probe ; he should not write 
about the emotions and the thoughts of his characters. 
The words he uses must be the thoughts — be the 
emotions. 

" I think that the analytic psychological novel is 
becoming a thing of the past ; that the synthetic 
psychological novel is taking its place, and there can 
be little doubt that it has a future before it." 



DOROTHY RICHARDSON 

Miss Dorothy Richardson wrote as follows : — 

" All kinds of novels should have, if we keep our 
balance on the rope, a far wider acceptance, in the 
immediate future, than ever in the past. If we do 
not keep our balance, the future of the novel, though 
wide, is indefinitely remote. 

" Romance telling of fairies or demons in the 
woods, and of giants and pygmies amongst humanity, 
people we should like or hate to be, willing and 
acting on a stage that holds our eyes by its size or 
by its remoteness, or both, will still afford us, in the 
hands of a master, the vast recreation of vicarious 
living, expansion of consciousness, ennoblement, 01 
a wholesome despair. 

" Realism, substituting ' nature-study ' for the 
fairies and demons of the woods, and the average man 
in average circumstances for the giants and pygmies 
on the vast stage, has unprecedented opportunities 
of expansion, since it marches always with the times ; 
its stress being upon environment, whether of circum- 
stance or of given individual character ; and its 
sources — chiefly science, notably the science of psy- 
chology — perpetually redescribing character, and the 
movement of events, perpetually reconstructing en- 
vironment, were never so active as they are to-day. 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 91 

" The third form of the novel, still in its infancy, 
whose exponents are unable to accept either the 
demons and fairies of romance or the ' facts ' of 
' nature-study ' as adequate accounts of the world, 
and place their emphasis on the individual, whether 
' average ' or exceptional, will continue to hold writer 
and reader at home in the universal marvel of existence. 
It may be described either as a reaction from realism, 
though within it realism finds its fullest aesthetic 
development, or as a new birth of romance ; romance 
at last become real and brought home to stay. For 
just as it is realism at its fullest aesthetic development, 
so also it is romance in its simplest, truest form. 
Where it reaches its aim, it weaves for the reader 
the eternal romance of his own existence and demon- 
strates that aesthetic recreation is to be had not only 
by going far enough out, but also by coming near 
enough home. So far, only rough outlines have 
been drawn. Its first masterpiece will at once reveal 
the possibilities and confound, as a masterpiece always 
will confound, exact classification. For the great 
masters of the early form of romance are also realists, 
and the few masterpieces of realism are pure romance. 
It may be that the immediate development of the 
more recent experiments will produce an old-pattern, 
three-volume novel with the unities holding sway 
as never before, in its midst one person, one spot 
of earth, one moment of time. But the possibilities 
are various, and as they are worked out the new form 
will be found to be, not in opposition, but related to, 
throwing into relief, sometimes amplifying and inter- 
preting, what has gone before." 



BART KENNEDY 



" The novel that is worthy of the name is a magical, 
moving picture," said Mr. Bart Kennedy. " You 
may pick it up and start the machinery of it going 
whenever you like. And you may lay it down when 
the spirit moves you. It is yours to command. It 
may transport you through scenes of wonder. Or 
it may lay bare the subtlest workings of the human 
mind. For you — the reader — the one whose mind 
is linked with it, it evokes ideas and scenes and excite- 
ments and thrills. The magical signs that are on the 
page present them to you, and pass them before your 
eyes. 

" Good novels— bad novels — indifferent novels. Who 
is to define or to place them ? No one. For what 
is bad for you is good for another. The novel that 
J may delight in may bore you to death. The old 
saying that goes to the effect that what is one man's 
meat is another man's poison is true, especially of 
the novel. 

" The critic of the novel is simply one who does 
not know and who puts down what he does not know 
in an authoritative manner. He runs a bluff in an 
academic style. There have been splendid novels 
written by people who were not as nicely balanced 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 93 

in their upper storey as they might have been. There 
have been thrilling and exciting and adventurous 
novels written by people who have never stirred a 
yard away from their own doorsteps, so to speak. 
Maiden ladies have written profound stories con- 
cerning the very full life. Salacious novels have been 
written by women whose private characters were 
absolutely beyond reproach. And here I would like 
to remark in passing that Zola, who was one of the 
most unclean writers who ever spoiled paper, was a 
highly respectable person. The truth of the matter 
is that the critic of the novel who knows what is 
what, and why is why, is merely a daring person 
who — to use a slangy idiom — chances his arm. He 
is one who gets guineas on lofty high-brow, classy, 
false pretences. 

" There has been a good deal written to the effect 
that the novel is a picture of the life that surrounds 
the person who has been guilty of the said novel. 
This is funny. The novel — and the best at that — 
is simply a picture of life as seen through a certain 
individual's eyes. That individual may be a most 
squint-eyed person ; or he may be one who is not 
quite right in the head ; or he may be a gentleman 
of criminal tendencies ; or he may be a person of 
grand and noble character. But, whatever he may 
be, if a book has in it the mysterious something that 
holds interest, it will be read eagerly by those who 
are in mental consonance with him. 

" However, in novel- writing there is — when all is 
said and done — a playing of the game. There is 
something that ought not to be done. And that 
something is that books ought not to be written 
in a suggestive and salacious manner just for the 
purpose of selling. Certain men are doing this now, 
and it is a low-down thing to do. And when anything 
is said to them they have the hypocrisy and effrontery 
to protest to the effect that everything should be 



94 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

illumined by art. At that rate, a refuse-heap would 
be a fitting subject for artistic treatment. One 
would have more respect for these men if they were 
honest enough to admit that they dealt in salacity 
and uncleanness just in order to make money. 

" But bad and low-down though these men are, 
there are women who are worse. There are women 
in England to-day whose books are a scandal. They 
write vile and unclean books just to make money. 

" The novel in itself is a magical and wonderful 
thing if it is done straightly and honestly by the 
one who makes it. The more individual and in accord 
with its maker it be, the better it will be. It is a won- 
derful and changing picture made from the im- 
pressions of the life that surrounds him. It can't 
please everyone. It can't have effect for everyone. 
It will only appeal to those who are in tune with it." 

" Yes, the novel fills a great need in our life. It 
takes us out of ourselves. It lifts us up when we 
are cast down. It cheers us when we are sad and 
lonely. It is the most wonderful of all the devices 
that have been invented for the amusement and the 
interesting of man. This book that you open ! 
These magical signs that carry you off into far, strange 
places ! Yes, this book is indeed a wonderful thing. 

" And let it be kept clean. Let it not be defiled 
by those whose only object in the attempting to make 
it is to see how closely they can sail to the wind in 
their endeavour to make money." 



BASIL CREIGHTON 



" What is a novel ? " asked Mr. Creighton. " A 
few months ago a reviewer let slip in his agony the 
verdict that incident counted for more in the novel 
than ' characterisation ' and we may hope that it 
eased the burden of his pain. At any rate some 
such or any such remark will serve to lay bare that 
complex organism as with a scalpel and to expose 
the nature of the beast. We see at once that incident 
is the heart, the liver and the reins. Without incident 
the creature could neither live nor move. A novel 
in fact is a story. Incident duly compacted and 
compounded is a plot. There lies the claim to the 
title of an art. If it does not tell a story to what 
domain of art can the novel possibly claim to belong ? 
And hence the future of- the novel would seem to lie 
in its continuing vitality as the art of telling stories. 
" And yet — this is lip service to a truism — the 
novel is not so easily to be caught. For though it 
be granted that the plot is nine-tenths of the business, 
yet it is true also that it is the remaining tenth which 
engrosses the other nine. This odd beast is found to 
develop more vitality from a supernumerary organ 
which ought to play a minor part, than from all the 
others on which it ought chiefly to rely. The novel 

95 



96 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

resembles that Australian bird which has used its 
legs to such purpose that its wings have become 
useless stumps. It is a bird and it ought to fly, 
or at least to flap its wings, but it contrives to prolong 
its existence on legs which almost rival wings in the 
power of eluding pursuit. 

" From early times in its career the novel began to 
provide for a time when the glory of being an art 
might become a nuisance. Indeed its mixed parentage 
and casual upbringing have given it in England 
particularly a certain indifference to the patronage 
of the muses. It may be told that it was born to 
tell stories and that if it does it well it may be called 
an art, but had it listened to these blandishments 
it would by this time have exhausted its power to 
survive. Arts have their moments, but they are 
costly and soon exhaust the genius of men. How 
many good stories, how many stories of which the 
plot is nine-tenths have been written ? Not a great 
number, probably. As an art in this stricter sense 
the novel would attract little attention except at 
rare intervals or in a great period or two. It would 
hang on in between — as in fact the detective story or 
the story of adventure does hang on, waiting for its 
Conan Doyle or its Stevenson. 

" But by a process of adaptation and mutation 
the novel as it actually is eludes the pursuit of dictums 
or of dicta, however sound. It grows on out of 
itself, submerging and treading down its past, in- 
different so long as the species lives whether or no 
it throws off perfect examples of its kind which shall 
inherit eternity. 

" How is this impudence achieved ? By what 
alchemy does the novel transfer to the species the 
immortality which in other arts is the aspiration of 
the individual work ? 

" The truth seems to be that the novel is scarcely 
an art at all. It is not the mere statement and re- 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 97 

statement of a diminishing perfection, the constant 
re-issue of a fading stamp. It is not the often repeated 
Venus of Praxiteles, or Virgin and Child, or the multipli- 
cation of sonnets by virtue of the Petrachian model. 
It preserves no unities and has no traditions calling 
for hectic revolt. There is no post-impressionism 
of novels. A novel cannot be cubed. For it cannot 
outdo itself. It cannot outrage itself. For it is 
always giving birth to itself as the last outrage. 

" By discarding art altogether the novelist eludes 
the law of art's decay. His art too strictly seen 
would have become a poisoned shirt or a dead husk 
within which his life would have shrunk away. But 
as it is, he is free. ' My wings,' he says, or may 
come to say, ' have long been useless, but see how I 
run.' And with that he darts forth into almost 
illimitable horizons. He feeds for a while in local 
dialects and manners, and is gone. You find him 
next in the aquatic flats of drab emotions. Social 
theory may nourish him next or the paradoxical 
delights of morals or the scandals of packing meat. 
' Nihil humanum ' he cries, and before you can look 
he is gaily revelling in his own inside, himself the 
vulture and himself the god in chains. Then there 
are the landslides of ' good taste,' and the novelist 
finds a rich field in the lapse of reticence. But 
reticence is a relative term and as it recedes new vistas 
open calling for exploration. There is all life and 
all that is done in it. He will show you the workings 
of every kind of thing and the ethics of every kind of 
emotion. And again, though life may be sane and 
ordered on the whole, this lively showman can make 
it shine again and hold up to it funny mirrors which 
show it all awry. 

" The future of the novel in fact is the future of 
life, of life as it is and as it isn't, as it will be and 
as it won't be. So long as there is religion there will 
be sermons and so long as there is life there will be 



98 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

novels, granted that the novel accepts itself and is 
accepted as life's commentary. Plot, construction, 
the formulae of art, might be nine-tenths of the novel if 
the novel did not engross for itself nine-tenths of life, 
and ' characterisation ' might count for less in the novel 
than incident if people were not infinitely more various 
than the incidents which can possibly befall them. 
Marriage is a good incident, but it would surely long 
since have played out its part in fiction if the 
people who marry were not the mainstay of the matter. 
Those who say of novels ' Give me a good plot ' 
remind one of the offer of £5,000 for a hippopotamus 
trained to rival Norah of the Nile, the most wonderful 
performing animal in existence. They either know 
that they ask a lot, or else they do not know what 
they ask. And the novelist who calls himself an 
artist with any rigour forgets that he is calling in a 
standard which would long ago have restricted, if 
not crushed out, the fellowship to which he belongs. 
If his forerunners had taken art to wife, who would 
be their children and where would be the lusty brood ? 
There are, of course, dangers to the novel in being 
so terrifically prolific. Not long ago one novelist 
or two served the nation, and one is told that Anthony 
Trollope monopolised the book-stalls. But that is a 
further question. To-day, at any rate, every section, 
grade and shade of the community has its novelist, 
and for many novelists the future of the novel may 
be — ' For every novel a reader or two.' " 



EDEN PHILLPOTTS 



When asked his opinion about the novel of the 
future, Mr. Eden Phillpotts, in a letter, gave expres- 
sion to these views : — 

" I cannot predict with any confidence what 
evolution has in store for the novel, seeing I know not 
the changes in taste that lie ahead. The novel must 
continue to be entertaining if it is to endure ; but 
who shall say what our children's children will regard 
as entertainment ? Education is largely modifying 
the standards and amusement values, and science 
is confounding art. The novel must be brave and face 
tremendous adventures — chiefly down-hill. 

" Perhaps novel and stage play are destined to 
merge into moving pictures, with phonographic 
accompaniment and colour added. The concoction, 
having passed moral tests, would be streamed into 
our private homes with the electricity and water — 
assuming, of course, that under communism the private 
house will be still a part of life and that art of some 
sort will also be permitted to linger on." 



99 



ANTHONY HOPE 



According to Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins the novel 
is always the reflection of the state of society at any 
given period. " To prophesy the future of the novel," 
he remarked, "is to prophesy the future of society." 

" The two prominent movements abroad," continued 
Sir Anthony, " representing the social unrest and the 
feminine unrest, are voiced in the novels of to-day. 
Most of the successes of the younger novelists have 
represented either the insurgent poorer, or lower, 
classes rebelling against their economic positions, 
or else the rebellion of women against the limitations 
attached by convention to their sex. And probably 
this will continue to be the note of the modern novel 
for some time to come. 

" One criticism of this might be that it is too 
strong a reaction against the sort of society which 
Thackeray treated of. People are not uninteresting 
because they happen to be well off or to mix in public 
affairs. And there are younger novelists who recognise 
this ; for example, Mr. Stephen McKenna. 

" Another criticism of what may be called the 
Movement School of Fiction is that the characters 
are rather apt to become merely the creatures of the 
movements and not real individuals themselves. 

100 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 101 
That is to say, they go through a number of episodes 
and experiences which illustrate, often very clearly, 
the trend of events and feelings, but they themselves 
are little more than passive recipients and do not 
stand out as real people themselves. So far as that 
tendency exists, it results rather in what is called 
realism than in what is called romance, because 
romance consists mainly in an assertion of the free- 
dom and the power of the individual, while realism 
consists mainly in presenting him as one of a multi- 
tude, willingly or unwillingly acting in subjection to 
external circumstances. 

" The realistic tendency is, on the whole, pre- 
dominant at the present moment. This fact is again 
reflected in the idea that there is something super- 
ficial about comedy, because comedy, like romance, 
is based upon the free action of the will, while tragedy 
is an unsuccessful struggle against fate. 

"It is probable that a short time will witness 
a revival in fiction of the romantic spirit, though not, 
perhaps, until social conditions are more favourable. 

" If the masses of the people attain to happier 
conditions of life, they will be more able to develop 
their character and individualities, and the novelists 
who spring from them will in their writing reflect 
this change by giving greater importance to the 
play and power of the individual will." 



CONSTANCE HOLME 



" The future of the novel is surely absolutely 
co-existent with the future of humanity," wrote 
Miss Constance Holme, " because it has become the 
supreme vehicle of expression on the part of humanity. 
At this period of upheaval, therefore, it is just as 
difficult to prophesy about one as about the other. 
If the world continues to inquire into the why and 
wherefore of things, the novel will doubtless increase 
in numbers and scope in order both to voice and to 
answer that inquiry. If the demand for knowledge 
narrows down, the novel also will narrow down ; 
but the former seems to me far more likely. All 
around we are restless brains, asking the reason of 
everything under the sun, and the novel happens 
to be the easiest and most alluring — if not necessarily 
the most reliable — method of dealing with human 
problems. 

" This confidence in the continuance of the novel 
may seem extreme in the present circumstances, 
but it is justified by statistics. In spite of the agonies 
of the publishers, for instance, their Circular announces 
an exceptionally large increase in fiction for 1920. 
The War, too, was expected to kill the novel, at least 
temporarily, but I think I am right in saying that it 

102 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 103 

did it very little harm. Unless it is at the moment 
rushing to a destruction of which a country-domiciled 
author is unaware it should continue to flourish as 
long as the human need for it exists. 

" Growth of thought, expansion of education and 
experience all contribute to power of expression, 
the desire for which, however unconscious, is always 
present in the human breast. If I could only say 
what I mean ! — there is no cry more constant on the 
human lips. As more and more people become 
conscious of this desire and the power to satisfy 
it, more and more shall we have them breaking out 
into the printed word. And that printed word is 
likely to be the word of the novel, because, as I have 
said, it is the most human form of expression. It 
has the endless scope of humanity, its greatness and 
its pettiness, its drama and its serenity, its dark 
places and. its soaring spiritualities. The novel will 
rise and fall with human nature because it is rooted 
in it. It is flesh of its flesh and bone of its bone, 
while at its best it becomes also the incarnate spirit 
of man, which lives on long after the flesh and bone 
of his generation have perished and gone. 

" We have also to remember that the novel is 
becoming more and more the recognised means of 
escape from the growing pressure of existence. Minds 
that think are only too apt to be also minds that are 
afraid, and that require a new heaven and a new 
earth either of their own creating or somebody else's. 
The immense demand of the class that once scarcely 
read for all novels of the ' popular ' order, is in 
itself a sign that the soul is stirring in its sleep. Asking 
for a drug, perhaps, that it may sleep again, or at 
the best, for a world of false delights in which it. may 
lose its consciousness of unease ; but still asking. 
And at countless points through the veil of sentimen- 
tality with which this class of writing seems to be 
stifling the masses, brighter spirits are lifting their 



104 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

little lamps for a spark from the altars of the true 
literature. 

" Confidence, however, in the increased persistence 
of the novel does not necessarily presuppose confidence 
in its increased perfection. On the contrary, with 
both creation and demand coming in so many cases 
from raw, untrained minds, we are likely to have for 
some time a greater aggregate of inferior products. 
The novel will follow the trend of its time as the hand 
follows the glove, and that trend is not artistically 
upwards. The very qualities that will keep the 
novel alive — its scope and humanity — will militate 
against its artistic growth. Nevertheless, there will 
always be artists, even if they seem fewer in numbers 
than ever because of the greater mass of others around 
them. Always there will be lone souls urged by the 
thirst for perfection, willing to scorn delights and live 
laborious days. 

" At least we may hope that, after our late stirring 
with the spoon of war, we may perceive a greater 
sense of universality, that quality so conspicuous 
by its absence in the novel of to-day. Surely it is 
time that the realist, intent on his ' slice of life,' 
and the idealist, intent on his slice of fairyland or 
Heaven, should combine to open each other's eyes ? 
The idealist has the sense of the universe the more 
strongly of the two, but unfortunately it is generally 
the wrong universe. The realist is so busy dissecting 
his slice of life that he forgets that body he has cut it 
out of. It is time that the novelist should look not 
only more distinctly at things as they are, but at a 
great many more of them. It is amazing from how 
many novels one receives the impression that their 
authors have never heard of the country or the sea, 
of any history whatsoever, and least of all of the 
innumerable forms of toil upon which mankind is 
engaged. The romance of work is one that writers 
neglect largely on the whole, in spite of the fact 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 105 

that to many men — and women — it stands for their 
whole lives. In the novel of the future it would be 
cheering to see a great consciousness of background 
as well as of the artistic value of toil. Toil, however, 
is not a subject that we mention in England, just 
now ! It is vieux jeu. And yet (all my above 
prosing apart), what honest novelist but will admit 
that, except for the ' joy of the working,' there would 
be little real raison d'etre for the novel at all ? " 



W. B. MAXWELL 



Mr. W. B. Maxwell is of opinion that there is no 
doubt whatever that the novel has a future. 

"It is not going to be withered by the lightning 
flash of the cinema lantern," he said, " or crushed out 
of existence by the rollers that print the daily illustrated 
newspapers. The very people who nowadays seem to 
be all eyes and no ears suddenly drop a curtain on the 
external world in order to listen to the magic whisper 
that issues from the pages of a book. They do it in 
the most incongruous places too — on the tops of 
omnibuses, in the corridors of Government offices, in 
the lifts of Tube railways. ' Look at that girl,' says 
the matronly representative of an earlier generation. 
' I took her to Madame Tussaud's yesterday ; she's 
going to the pantomime this evening ; and yet there 
she is at her book again.' 

" And a book, it may be added, in common parlance 
is a novel. 

" No, novel-reading has become a national habit — 
a far stronger habit than that of sweet-sucking, jazz- 
dancing, — or even cigarette-smoking. For instance, 
among girls at least, cigarette-smoking is on the 
decrease ; whereas, with both sexes, novel-reading is 
always increasing. Literally an army of men con- 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 107 

firmed themselves in the habit during the war ; for all 
read novels while on active service — in rest camps, 
in Y.M.C.A. huts, in the trenches themselves. 

" But if one has no doubt as to the future of the 
novel, one may well be doubtful in regard to the novel 
of the future. In this respect I speak with extreme 
diffidence, because I have made many prophecies on 
the subject ; and, like most modern prophets, I have 
been wrong every time. Called upon to hold forth to 
a company of brother writers about ten years ago, I 
ventured to predict that the psychological novel must 
be the novel of the future. In using this much dis- 
liked adjective I did not mean to plead for long- 
winded analysis, cumbrous introspection, or morbidity 
of any sort ; I meant only that real success would not 
be achieved by any novel that did not make its main 
appeal for interest in the tracing of states of mind. 
In other words, that readers must have puppets that 
thought and felt, and that they would not any longer 
put up with puppets that merely acted. But in 
making this shot I was completely off the target. A 
dozen boisterous successes every publishing season 
showed how immensely fond the world still was of 
adventure, plot, and fantastic intrigue. 

" While the war lasted, I prophesied that peace 
would usher in a new vigorous school of romantic 
novelists. 

" It seemed to me quite obvious that a universe 
oppressed for so long by hideous realities must crave 
for the realm of pure imagination. Novelists, to be 
successful, must strike a note of gaiety, of sheer 
joyousness, in response to the cry of ' Make us forget.' 
'Away with drab tales of ordinary life, its sordid pains, 
its colourless pleasures. Take us out of ourselves, lift 
us up, carry us to f airyland. ' But here again I was 
hopelessly wrong. The seven hundred paged story 
of everyday life is more fashionable than ever. Some 
really excellent and very successful contemporary 



108 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

novels leave one as sad and uncomfortable as if one 
had picnicked on a cold day in a deserted grave-yard. 

" At the present time, as I understand, the future 
of the novel is said to be jeopardised by the tremend- 
ously enhanced cost of production. Publishers them- 
selves take a gloomy view. But as long as I can remem- 
ber publishers always did take that view — at least, 
when they talked business. A publisher, when you 
meet him out at dinner, is a delightful optimistic 
companion, full of laughter and merry talk ; but if you 
go to see him to discuss your next master-piece, or 
to interview him on the general prospects of ' the 
trade he is a terrible pessimist. Personally, after 
talking to publishers, I always feel that my last novel 
is not only my last novel, but the last novel. It has 
just scraped through ; but the crash is here. ' The 
trade ' is collapsing. There will be no more novels. 

" I suppose if the published price of novels is made 
much higher, we shall go back to the style of circula- 
tion of the three-volume days. People will cease to 
buy new novels ; they will only borrow them. But 
will this matter ? I am myself so much an optimist, 
so firmty persuaded that the English-speaking race 
cannot get on without novels, that I believe if people 
cannot afford to buy and are unable to borrow novels, 
they will steal them. What an advertisement that 
would be. ' John Brown, 38, no occupation, charged 

with abstracting Mr. — 's new novel, ' The Mountain 

of Love ' ; from the publisher's counter, pleaded guilty 
to the charge, and said that he had no excuse to offer, 
except that he could not wait for it to appear in a cheap 
edition.' " 



J. D. BERESFORD 



Mr. J. D. Beresford expressed the opinion that we 
cannot foresee what the future may produce in the 
way of a great novelist, and as it may produce a man 
whose effect upon the novel may be very considerable, 
any prophecy must necessarily leave that contingency 
out of account. 

" Generally, however," he said, " my opinion about 
the novel of the near future is that the whole tendency 
is away from that realism which has been the main line 
of development of the English novel from the days of 
Samuel Richardson onwards. 

" One reason for this opinion is that realism is, in 
one sense, an experiment, an experiment which, I 
think, has now reached its limit. If you want to press 
the experiment any further, you must use the film. 
In literature we must assume that the true record of 
life, so far as it can be put down in words, is the effect 
that life has made upon the recording consciousness. 
To be consistent, therefore, we must not try to portray 
life in any other terms. To attain an ultimate realism 
we must drop altogether the detached, observing 
method ; we must not be objective, but subjective. 
Instead of describing the observed fact we must 
describe our own reactions to the fact, and so far as 

109 



no THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

may be, exclude from our record the fact itself, that is 
to say, the fact as it might be seen by the average 
witness. Two remarkable examples of this method 
are the ' Ulysses ' of James Joyce, and the five volumes 
of ' Pilgrimage,' by Miss Dorothy Richardson. And 
I would submit that realism can go no further in this 
direction. 

" My second reason for thinking that Realism has 
no great future is that we have passed through an 
experience in the war which has brought people out of 
themselves and into touch with life in a way they have 
never been. And that experience will certainly be 
continued in the future, because civilisation is in a 
state of flux, and it is inconceivable that in the present 
generation we can return to the safety and security 
possible in the days before the war. 

" I believe that an individual secure from the 
threat of poverty and interference will take an interest 
in fiction that presents to him conditions that he will 
never have to suffer. In this way he achieves an 
extension of himself in imagination that he does not 
desire to get in life. But when conditions are threaten- 
ing his present security, he does not wish to be re- 
minded of that fact in his reading. An example of 
this was the unpopularity of war-fiction during the 
last years of the war. As a consequence, therefore, 
of the present industrial unrest, I believe that the 
majority of readers will seek fantasy and romance in 
their fiction : will seek, that is, material that takes 
them away from the field of their present experience, 
but which, nevertheless, brings out the full value of 
human relationships and achievement. 

" But if I have no faith in the success of the realistic 
novel in the near future, we can look forward quite 
confidently to the survival of stories of love, adventure 
and mystery, which have a perennial value. 

" The writer who can tell a story is always sure of 
an audience, because he deals with the fundamental 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL in 

values and problems of life, apart from any particular 
background and setting. Next I see a possible future 
for the more or less religious novel. It will avoid all 
argument and its religious tendency may have little 
relation to the theology of the churches. But it will 
have as its first recommendation that quality which the 
Americans conveniently refer to as ' uplift.' I can 
well imagine that it will be allied to the teachings of 
Spiritualism. 

" The real chance for the artist, however, is in supply- 
ing the needs of fantasy, which is the ordinary human 
being's escape from life, the imaginative complement 
of experience. His stories will be romantic in essence, 
and will embody a type rather than present the 
familiar individual ; he has, in fact, if he desires a wide 
circulation, to present so catholic a type that his 
fantasy will appeal to — and console the lives of — as 
many readers as possible. But to do this requires very 
great gifts of imagination, intuition, and power of 
expression ; the romantic, artistic achievement I have 
indicated is not within the reach of the average novelist. 

" A propos of civilisation being in a state of flux, 
I may say that I am by no means alone in the belief 
that European civilisation is tending to disintegrate. 
The war quickened the process by thirty years, and 
the growing strength of the democratic idea will be the 
chief factor in maintaining it. And if I am right in 
this, I am certain that people who will be fighting a 
losing struggle with life will want to read only of 
success ; they will want to escape from life in their 
fantasies, and will find that escape mainly in Romance." 



GILBERT FRANKAU 



Mr. Gilbert Frankau is a man of medium height, 
with a lithe, alert figure, a wide forehead, and eyes 
which suggest both the habitual faculty of concentra- 
tion and a sense of humour. There is that about him 
which gives you the impression of a large reservoir of 
latent energy. 

As one would expect from his books, Mr. Frankau is 
an exceedingly careful worker. He showed me a 
typed script of his forthcoming novel which was 
literally a mass of corrections. 

" I am a great believer in hard work," he said. " It 
is the only way to get things done. I have not had a 
holiday for three years. I have signed a contract for 
a novel a year for the next ten years, and in addition 
I write about twelve short stories a year, besides con- 
tributing a weekly article of 2,000 words." 

Mr. Frankau remarked incidentally that in his 
opinion all the best literary and artistic work in the 
world had been achieved on the spur of necessity. 

" What do you think evolution has in store for the 
novel ? " I asked. 

" There are two classes of novel," replied Mr. 
Frankau. " There is the psychological novel, which I 

112 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 113 

should prefer to call the novel of character, and there 
is the story-teller's novel, or the novel of incident. 

" I do not consider that the former class of novel 
will be able to stand up against the onrush of demo- 
cracy. Democracy is as yet half-educated, and 
demands full-blooded tales with heroes, heroines and 
villains. 

" Without in any way pandering to the lesser 
educated amongst us, I do sincerely believe that the 
novel of the future will have to be written by the 
people for the people. 

" The art of story-telling is older than Homer. It 
is inherent in the human animal. From earliest 
childhood we all want to be taken out of ourselves 
into the realm of romance. So long as the novelist 
will hold this truth in his mind's eye, will eschew 
propaganda, and remember that a story should have 
a beginning, a middle and an end, I see a great future 
for that novelist. 

"lam only young at the craft myself, so perhaps I 
should not be so dogmatic. Nevertheless, I do feel 
that our novelists of the past twenty years have been 
inclined to neglect the story for the characters. The 
older novelists, Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Fielding, 
and our oldest novelist, Defoe, stuck to their stories. 

" It is, if I may say so, because I hold these views 
about story-telling that I am following Peter Jackson 
with a story of pure mystery and adventure, — a 
constructed storv. 

" ' The Seeds "of Enchantment,' as I call my new 
book, is an experiment. Frankly, I am not very 
doubtful as to its success." 

Just before I left I mentioned that I was sorry to 
say I had not yet read " Peter Jackson." 

At which Mr. Frankau airily waved his hand, saying, 
" Your loss, my dear sir, — your loss, not mine ! " and 
thereupon pleasantly bade me au revoir. 



GERTRUDE ATHERTON 



Miss Gertrude Atherton sent the following com- 
munication in response to my queries : — 

" In spite of moving pictures, in spite of cheap 
magazines (eight for the price of one novel) there is 
still a public for the comprehensive, deep pictures of 
life that only the novel can portray. If one public is 
more avid for sensation than ever, since the war, 
there is a smaller but not insignificant public that 
always did demand serious studies of life at first hand 
by men and women whose superior gifts and oppor- 
tunities enable them to see in both life and human 
nature what is for ever hidden from the mere story- 
tellers. This public, which measurably increased 
during a war that induced serious moments in all but 
congenital idiots, has always rejected ' glad stuff,' 
' sex stuff,' a pandering to the fashion of the moment. 
Now, more than ever, do people crave and demand 
fiction that appeals to the higher intelligence, first- 
hand observations of life — without moralizing and 
other ponderosities — a new but not bizarre point of 
view, life as it is, not as it should be, wit, irony, humour, 
and style, without those eccentricities that divert the 
attention from the subject matter. They might 

114 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 115 

reject the most worthy of novels if it were dull, but no 
master of his art (and craft) ever is dull. 

" This public will, in the nature of things, expand, 
and with the inevitable result that in time only the 
very best novels will find either publishers and public ; 
leaving those that have invention rather than imagina- 
tion, the yarn-spinning faculty instead of the gift for 
interpretation of life and character, to console them- 
selves with the magazines (which multiply like Japanese) 
and those moving picture producers who cater to the 
mob. Several producers in the United States, by the 
way, notably Mr. Goldwyn, have recently become 
inspired with the ambition to lift the Cinema from the 
Third Industry up to a place among the Arts. But 
when that blessed consummation is with us the best 
of the novelists will be safe, whether their work prove 
to be ' picturable ' or not. Nothing can ever take the 
place of a good book." 



KATHLYN RHODES 



" There only appears to me to be one certainty about 
the future of the novel," said Miss Kathlyn Rhodes, 
" and that is, that it has a future. From early ages the 
story-teller has held an important place in the scheme 
of things ; and the child's first intelligent demand has 
always been — Tell me a story ! Personally, I think 
the novel of the future will be the one which tells a 
story. . . an interesting story, in an interesting 
way. The increasing demand for stories of the East, 
or of some sun-baked island in the South Seas proves, I 
think, that many people read from a desire to forget, 
temporarily, their own perfectly comfortable, but 
rather drab surroundings, to enjoy, vicariously, the 
experiences of more fortunate travellers, to visit, in 
imagination at least, the beautiful countries in which 
they will never set foot. 

" At the present time certain writers are endeavour- 
ing to ' boom ' the purely psychological novel, as 
apart from the novel of incident, the novel in which 
there is a clear and connected plot, in other words, the 
novel which tells a story. The only kind of novel 
worth considering, they say, is the one in which a 
small group of characters — or, preferably, a single 
character — is dissected at great length, and with an 
often tedious minuteness of detail. The thoughts, 

116 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 117 

emotions, sensations of this character, generally a 
young girl, are set forth with laborious care like 
specimens in a laboratory, and the reader is called 
upon to applaud the absolute fidelity to life displayed 
in the presentation of these things. 

"As a rule nothing happens — beyond an unusually 
vivid sensation of one sort or another ; and at the end 
of the book the reader is worried, tired-out, jaded, as 
one is after a call from some dull and prosy friend, 
whose conversation is full of her home, her children, 
her ailments, and her servants. All the above are 
parts of what some people call ' real ' life ; but there is 
no denying they are often mighty dull. And in the 
same way a ' human document ' may be a very dull 
document. I think it was Wilkie Collins who main- 
tained that the true purpose of the novel was to ' tell a 
story.' I wonder what the author of ' The Woman in 
White ' would have said to the present psycho-analyti- 
cal school of novelists ? 

" The adherents of the above school will retort that 
a character study is of more value, from a literary 
point of view, than a mere narrative of happenings, 
romantic, bizarre, or dramatic, as the case may be. 
But the character which is expressed through action is 
generally a good deal more convincing than the 
character which is insisted on, reiterated, driven in, so 
to speak, with a sledge-hammer. In this connection 
Mr. Henry James says somewhere — ' What is character 
but the determination of incident ? What is incident 
but the illustration of character ? ' And the really 
notable novel is that in which incident and character 
are thus co-related. 

" The reading public, fortunately for novelists, is a 
huge one ; and the three classes into which it may, very 
roughly, be divided — that is the intellectual reader, 
the intelligent reader, and the uncritical reader— must 
all be provided for. Luckily no one, save the reviewer, 
is obliged to read anything he doesn't like. A reader 



n8 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

of the first class may prefer George Meredith, one of 
the third — Charles Garvice ; but as a rule there is no 
obligation to exchange books ; and probably fresh 
writers will arise from time to time to supply the 
different demands. The cardinal sin of the writer is 
verbosity ; and in spite of the enormously high price of 
books, many novels are still of great length. One 
sighs sometimes for the beautiful brevity of the 
Biblical stories, which present a whole drama of 
character and incident in a few lines, or the equally 
terse style of the Northern Sagas where the end of a 
character is reported thus, without any harrowing 
death agonies, — 

" ' . . . and Gretir the Strong smote his enemy 
so that he died. And now he is out of the story. 1 " 



ALICE PERRIN 



" Who could venture to prophesy about anything 
unless gifted with second-sight, which, from the police 
reports, would appear sometimes to be a more or less 
dangerous attribute ? " said Mrs. Perrin. 

" But as I am not at the moment gazing into a 
crystal or examining the lines on some prominent 
publisher's hands, I may perhaps, with safety, declare 
that only with the end of the world will come the end 
of the novel ; and even then, possibly we may hope to 
find it, devoid of all connection with filthy lucre, in 
the realms described to us by the Rev. Vale Owen. 

" Of course eight or nine shillings seems an appalling 
price to pay for a work of imagination that may have 
cost the writer a year, or may be years, of hard work ; 
and what it has cost the publisher he and Heaven alone 
can say, — and sometimes he says it has cost him a 
vast deal more than he has bestowed upon the author 
who has written it. 

" But (unfortunately for me) I can well remember 
that period of the ' three decker ' novel, which, though 
of no greater length than present day works of fiction, 
cost over thirty shillings, and even then library sub- 
scriptions were not so very much higher than they are 
now, when there are so many more libraries. Also, 

119 



120 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

the chances for ' first novels ' seem to stand higher, 
considering the ' hundreds of pounds ' of prizes offered 
by various publishing houses for the article. 

" But publishers, I suppose, must live, and so, pre- 
sumably, must authors, so if novels are to become 
extinct we may perhaps look for a simultaneous demise 
of the two ; but more likely the author would expire 
first, for I have never yet heard a publisher acknowledge 
that he depends solely on his business to keep him alive. 
However, let us hope for the best. 

" If printers and binders and paper-makers continue 
to obtain the large wages and prices we hear of, it 
seems to me that the novel must come down in price, 
since it would be quite possible to produce even 
cheaper bindings, less good print, and more horrible 
paper than is being ' put out ' at present ; more 
millions of the public would buy, and the incurable 
novel reader would rejoice ; such productions would 
also wear out more rapidly in the libraries and have 
to be more quickly replaced. 

" The feelings of the author might surfer with such 
a plan (for authors are notoriously sensitive to the 
' get up ' of their works) but his, or more often her, 
pocket would find no reason to grumble ; and certainly 
the bookseller, who is so often accused of being the 
stumbling block between publisher and author, would 
benefit — though to an outsider it would appear easy 
enough for the publishing firms to combine and throw 
off the ' tyranny ' of the bookseller. 

" Now, authors cannot combine. To begin with, it 
is too individual a profession ; they are often extra- 
ordinarily ignorant of business, and many of them write 
for other reasons than the labourer's hire. Novel 
writing is about the only profession into which people 
will rush without training, or study, or practice. 
Given the talent, which is no more to be acquired than 
the shape of one's nose or the colour of one's eyes, it is 
an Art that can be learnt, that must be learnt, since 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 121 

genuine success can never be achieved without a 
working knowledge of the tools that have been given 
us. 

" Who would dream, for example, of making a 
public appearance on a concert platform if he, or she, 
could play or sing only by ear ? Who could expect to 
have a picture accepted for exhibition that had been 
painted solely by instinct ? Yet novels get accepted 
and published (never mind how !) that betray the 
writer's ignorance of form, technique, and construc- 
tion, not to mention the word grammar ; and though 
from their very spontaneity such productions may 
meet with an ephemeral success, that success cannot 
continue because it is not founded on real work. It is 
novel- writing ' by ear.' 

" If prices keep up to their present level — some say 
they will go higher, but this I doubt because the public 
will not stand it — the amateur novel will stand a poor 
chance ; there will be more room at the libraries and at 
the booksellers for good work, and the standard of 
novel writing would rise. But if, as I have ventured 
to predict, prices go down, with further deterioration 
of print, covers, ' jackets,' and general get-up, pub- 
lishers will cease to fill the air with laments, readers of 
sensational rubbish, and lovers of a good, well-written 
novel will be happy ; and so will the authors." 



L 



MRS. DAWSON-SCOTT 



" A novel, to my way of thinking, " said Mrs. Dawson- 
Scott (the founder of the To-morrow Club, and author 
of " Wastrels " and " The Headland ") in an interview, 
"is an expression of the ego of the individual writing, 
and an attempt to reach other minds which are in 
sympathy with his point of view. It is also both an 
expression and a confession of your own experience of 
life. The individual does not as a rule think as to how 
his work will strike others, because he feels that his 
personal experience must be common to humanity. It 
is therefore a surprise to him that he is not universally 
popular. The novel is a case of ' many men, many 
minds.' Each different mind produces a different 
thing, just as different soils produce different plants. 
If your experience has been small and shallow, you 
cannot produce great work. But your work will always 
be in keeping with your temperament, and people who 
feel very deeply and think very widely will, if they 
have the gift of expression, always be able to produce 
fine and enduring literature. 

" These various methods of telling a story may be 
grouped into schools, but only because examples of the 
same method may happen to resemble one another. 
But if they are closely examined it will be seen that 
each is individual. 

122 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 123 

"I do not think the future will show any great 
change in the finest methods of telling a story that we 
have already had. We do not tell a story to-day better 
than Homer did three thousand years ago. Novelists 
are playing with their material and trying to evolve 
new forms, but the chief thing, after all, is to tell a 
story as interestingly as possible. The relations of 
human beings to one another and their relationship to 
the universal, are the things in which other human 
beings are interested." 



I. A. R.?" WYLIE 



"I am not very optimistic about the future of the novel/' 
remarked Miss Wylie. " In fact, unless something 
very drastic happens I do not expect the novel will be 
in existence in about ten or fifteen years. 

" I feel very strongly that the novelist is the direct 
descendant of the old troubadours, ballad-singers, and 
village story-tellers. Our really great writers of 
to-day seem to have quite lost sight of this tradition. 
They give me the impression of being rather ashamed 
of being story-tellers at all, or indeed of appealing in 
any way to the people for whom they are presumably 
writing. I think it is St. Dunstan who said ' It is 
better to be dull than not to be understood.' I would 
paraphrase that by saying that ' it is better not to 
write if nobody is going to read you.' " 

" The really first-class writer is so afraid of being 
popular that he becomes afraid of life itself. He 
confines himself to people and incidents duller and 
more morbid than life really is. He seems to be afraid, 
in his terror of being inartistic, of the high lights and 
the adventure in which life really abounds. He is 
intensely concerned with the commonplace, as though 
the commonplace were in itself valuable and artistic. 

" I consider that the reductio ad absurdum of the 
best authors of the day reaches its climax in the work 
of Dorothy Richardson. In my opinion her tendency 

124 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 125 

and the influence of the school she represents is fatal to 
the future of the novel, because the public cannot and 
will not accept this literary diet and, becoming equally 
tired of the trash of the ' best-seller,' ends by not read- 
ing at all. 

" The two people whom I consider will rescue the 
novel from its present morass are Joseph Conrad and 
Hugh Walpole, both of whom are lineal descendants 
of the greatest story-tellers in our literature. 

" I think that there are a number of other writers 
who could and did write great stories who have been 
affected by the virus of psycho-analysis and morbid 
introspection in all its forms. 

" Not only is the present style of novel- writing bad 
for the public, but it is bad for the writers. There is 
nothing so easy in the world to write as a pseudo- 
scientific psycho-analytical novel, but a big story, 
well-constructed and life-like as a Vandyke portrait, 
is a supremely difficult attainment. Writers who 
attempt to write a novel without a story are really 
taking the line of least resistance, and as a consequence 
they become facile and slipshod. 

" I think, in the first place, that a novel must tell 
a definite story. It must be true to life, not as a 
photograph, but as a great portrait is true to life. A 
great writer must be able to select his material in such 
a way as to give an appropriate form to the section 
of life which he has set out to describe. Absolute 
sincerity is of course a sine qua non. I think also that 
a great writer should be a poet at heart, and above 
all things that he should have the power to hold his 
readers either through joy or through pity and terror. ,? 



MARGARET PETERSON 



" I think it would be a great pity," said Miss Margaret 
Peterson in an interview, " if the women writers succeed 
in ousting the men in producing fiction, because I 
think that women are only just beginning to develop 
their creative art. Women are too personal in their 
writings and rely too much on the reproduction of 
their own feelings in their books. 

" Personally I do not think that fiction should be 
propagandist in tendency, but that authors should 
write either because they are tremendously interested 
in life or because they are themselves inspired by some 
great ideal. 

" The real object of a story is to please rather than 
to instruct. Love remains the greatest interest that 
you can bring into a novel, but by love I do not mean a 
psychological study of sex. I believe that the reading 
public are simply hungry for the love-romance which 
is the flowering of life, and I think it a pity that many 
writers of to-day should lay such stress on the crude 
impulses of humanity, while omitting so much of the 
beauty which lies dormant in v every human soul. 

" Fiction has a future full of promise before it, 
because people are everywhere reacting from the stress 
and strain of the war and its effects. They crave for 

126 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 127 

romance, in the widest meaning of the term. And 
whenever a real need is felt, it must produce its own 
fulfilment. 

" We must remember that in the cinema, authors 
have a formidable competitor, as the cinema does much 
to supply this hunger for colour and interest in what 
are otherwise rather grey lives. 

" I like to take as my motto Kipling's lines : 
' No one shall work for money, 
And no one shall work for fame, 
But each for the joy of the working ; 
And each in his separate star 
Shall draw the thing as he sees it 
For the Master of things-as-thev-are.' " 



RALPH STRAUS 



" The novel, of course, has a splendid and full-blooded 
future before it," asserted Mr. Ralph Straus. 

" To-day we are in an uncomfortable, unsettled 
period — a lean period for artists. To-day the various 
gentlemen who help to build up, in a physical sense, 
a novel — the compositors, and the pressmen and the 
binders and the packers and the people who watch 
these gentlemen doing their jobs — take all the profits 
from the sale of a novel. (Publishers never make 
money from novels ; they will tell you so themselves. 
And the novelist doesn't matter very much, does he ?) 
But even if affairs become worse, and the author is 
obliged to hire a calligrapher to write out a copy or two 
of his work to be handed about in the good old way ; 
even if the calligraphers strike, or the art of making 
pen-nibs be lost and the work has to be delivered to 
subscribers in some queer cinema-guise, the novel 
will prosper. 

" And history will repeat itself, for success will come 
to the writers of both the very good novels and the 
very bad novels. Nobody has ever really agreed about 
the scope or purpose or delimitation of the novel, but 
everybody knows that it cannot be created without 
rules. The great artist creates his own rules ; the 

128 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 129 

lesser man follows those already laid down. This 
will continue to happen and, were I to hazard a guess, 
it would be that the chasm separating the good and 
bad novels of the future will be greater than ever 
before. 

" I shudder to think of the very bad novels to come. 
They will sprout in their thousands and will differ 
not at all from their predecessors. The same old 
plots will be used in the same old ways. The villain 
may be heavily disguised but he will be there right 
enough, and the hero may be falsely accused for more 
than two hundred pages but he will win through in the 
end. The poor, pretty governess will be goaded into 
stealing the wicked earl's will until Doomsday (when, 
one supposes, such legal documents will be no longer 
required) and the young viscount will marry the 
governess in the penultimate chapter. The police will 
continue to be baffled, and new Tarzans will flourish. 
No, the very bad novels will not alter in essentials at 
all. And the reason is simple enough. Mr. Beresford 
has already explained it. What does the great 
reading public ask of a novel ? It desires nothing 
more than to be temporarily removed from its rather 
disappointing surroundings. It wishes to fly into a 
dream world differing in detail from, but fundamentally 
akin to, its own dream life. It has the choice of a 
self-created phantasy or the printed page. And it is 
not unimportant that such day-dreams should be, as 
they undoubtedly are, primitive and exciting. The 
average popular novel is, and will continue to be, 
primitive and exciting. More often than not it is a 
very bad novel. It will follow the old rules very 
slavishly. It will not attempt to teach or enlarge 
humanity's outlook or find fault with the old moral 
values. It will not make its reader think too much. 
It will just tell a story. 

" The great novels to come, however, embrace a 
far more difficult problem. Only a presumptuous 



130 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

man would care to say very much about them. It may 
happen that the psychological analysis, so popular 
to-day, may be found to be only a small and not the 
most interesting part of life. It may be that the finest 
interpretation of life will depend primarily on the 
objective treatment of a given theme. Whatever 
happens, the great novels of the future will be truly 
creative, forerunners that impel their readers to high 
thoughts. That ' form ' about which the experts so 
amusingly wrangle may exhibit a plasticity wholly 
beyond present day taste. But the chief thing that will 
matter is the writer's own genius. If this be great 
enough, form, language, story or theme — all become 
secondary affairs. 

" And there will always be somebody to publish such 
books " 



PAUL TRENT 



" I think that the development of the novel will be 
greatly affected by the increasing importance and value 
of the film rights," said Mr. Paul Trent. " It is only 
within the last few months that any British film 
producer has been able to put a novel on the screen 
and retain any of its atmosphere. Many screen- 
editions of novels written by well-known English 
writers have been produced in America, and I venture 
to suggest that the writers have bitterly regretted 
that they have ever been beguiled to give their consent 
to the productions. 

" I recently attended a dinner after which Stephen 
McKenna made a speech in which he hailed the com- 
pany which, was producing his novel as a philanthropist, 
remarking that the fees that he had received were 
' money for nothing ' — the idea in his mind being that 
he had written a story purely and simply as a novel, 
for which he had been duty paid, and that the film 
rights were more or less a gift. 

" I have seen recently trade shows of many British 
novels produced in this country, and the improve- 
ment is most marked, especially in the case of the 
Ideal films, whose programme of production for this 
year includes novels by George Meredith, Arnold 

131 



132 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

Bennett, Oscar Wilde, Compton Mackenzie, and 
Stephen McKenna. These are authors whom no 
monetary consideration could tempt to allow their 
books to be presented on the screen unless they were 
convinced that it would be artistically done. 

" With the majority of authors the monetary return 
must be a consideration. The cimema is practically 
in its infancy and I think its development will be 
very rapid. The ' movie-habit ' has already been 
acquired by millions, and, as pictures improve, it will 
increase. The war augmented the sale of cheap 
editions of novels, but this demand has not been 
sustained ; perhaps owing to the cessation of the 
demand from the trenches, but I think more owing to 
the increased attendance in picture houses. 

" Therefore I am most decidedly of the opinion that 
the author who must have an eye to his banking 
account will write with three-quarters of his eyes 
fixed on his film rights. In consequence, he will first 
of all have to tell a story, and his novel will not be able 
to consist chiefly of character analysis and more or 
less morbid reflections. This will tend to develop 
the novel of romance and action to which Anthony 
Hope has alluded. And this, I suggest, will be 
to the good of the reader. In these days of 
worry we all want to be taken happily out of ourselves. 
There never has been such an opportunity for the new 
writer to start out on a fresh line, such as Hope did in 
' Ruritania.' Unfortunately, I do not think that the 
publishers will give much chance to an unknown 
author, and I cannot blame them, as owing to the 
increased cost of production their venture has become 
much more hazardous than before. A few years ago, 
the sale of a few hundred copies at nominally six 
shillings each was profitable, but I understand that, 
with the higher prices, a bigger sale is necessary. 

" I prophesy with diffidence that, within the next 
three or four years, our ' popular ' writers will be work- 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 133 

ing directly for the screen, and that the novel will 
follow the film version. 

" I was speaking to one of the heads of the big film 
producing companies in this country, who told me of 
a book, written by an American and published in the 
States., that was practically unknown until the ' picture ' 
version was produced, and since then nearly a half- 
million of this author's books have been sold on this 
side. 

" Unless the author is a Croesus, he must consider 
the possibility of the filming of his story, and if the 
result is a diminution of the rather morbid, analytical, 
realistic output of recent years, I think it will be all 
to the good." 



ANDREW SOUTAR 



" The novel of the next few years must be instructive 
as well as entertaining," wrote Mr. Andrew Soutar. 
" The price of material and labour has reached an 
unprecedented height, but I think that the reading 
public and serious-minded novelists will be grateful 
if it rises still further, since it will dam the flood of 
cheap, pernicious, pornographic stories that nowadays 
pass for ' Art.' 

" Some people talk about the ' New School ' of 
authors, from which much is to be expected. My 
experience is that every five years a ' New School ' 
is founded, but the result is always the same. Young 
men with corrugated brows and dope-saddened eyes 
write what they call a ' sex-novel,' making a freer 
use of obscenities than did the school immediately 
preceding. They attract each other, these young men 
(and young women). I am told that they meet at 
each others' flats and read their works aloud. They 
hold a regular Durbar of mutual worship when one of 
their novels has been banned by the libraries. 

" Take all the books written during the last ten 
years, and you will not find one that approaches 
within an age the beauty of a simple story like ' Loina 
Doone,' the exquisite handling of domestic life to be 

134 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 135 

found in ' John Halifax, Gentleman.' Old and simple 
books (there are many others), yet they are selling 
to-day as well as ever. 

" What I mean by the instructive novel is that story 
which, while preserving a well-knit plot, is informative 
in its descriptions of the background against which the 
plot is laid. The author will not be allowed to say 
that his heroine jumped into the train at Charing Cross 
and rushed off to Monte Carlo. He will have to des- 
cribe the route, and the people among whom the heroine 
may find herself. If the author is compelled to send 
any of the characters to Russia, China, South Africa, 
or any other part of the world, the reader will demand 
a faithful, no matter how brief, description of the 
locale. In short, the author must know what he is 
writing about, apart from the constructing and develop- 
ing of the plot. 

" Personally, I have been closely identified, both 
here and in America, with the film play. I was told 
over there, and have been told here since, that the 
cinema is killing the novel. I don't believe it — 
although it is undoubtedly true that the novelist is 
sorely tempted, in shaping his book, to keep in mind 
the chances of disposing of the cinematograph rights. 
Thus, there may be a tendency to write a story that 
will fit the film rather than give way to natural im- 
pulses and write the story that the heart dictates. 

" Figures are more convincing than homilies. 
Nowadays, a novelist must sell at least ten thousand 
copies of his book before he can say that it has paid 
him to write it. (I know that the ' New School ' will 
put me on the rack for daring to suggest that novelists 
write for money : I used to attend that school twenty 
years ago, but I soon tired of it, because one was 
expected to learn so much on an empty stomach!) 
In the old days, before peace broke out, the novelist 
who sold five thousand copies at six shillings was 
regarded as a striking success. It is a happy man or 



136 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

woman, to-day, who can make a thousand pounds a 
year by novel-writing. 

" The cinema, however, has altered the whole 
situation. In New York this last summer, I came 
across case after case of the film rights of a book being 
sold for ten thousand dollars — £2,000 normal. I have 
known ten thousand dollars to be given for the film 
rights of a short story. I ask you, in face of these 
figures, is it to be wondered at that novelists are 
shaping their books towards the screen ? 

" In defence of the screen (it has many hostile 
critics, especially in the ' New School ') it has to be 
said that the sex story is the very last story that it 
wishes to consider. 

" The novel of the future, as you call it, must be one 
that will help the reader rather than pander to an 
unhealthy palate. The novel of ' breadth ' should be 
one that will help to rob life of some of its fears, and 
death of much of its sting. The warm-hearted book 
that leaves you thinking that you've just had tea in a 
sweet-smelling, whitewashed country cottage — hot 
tea with cream and toasted scones, and an old lady in 
a white cap to pour out the tea — that sort of book will 
never lack a market. 

" The sound mystery novel, so long as it is kept 
clean and plausible, will be selling when the prurient 
stuff from the ' New School ' has been repulped. I 
like those stories of adventure in mythical kingdoms, 
which Anthony Hope inagurated, and which David 
Whitelaw has so ably continued, in, for instance, 
' The Little Hour of Peter Wells/ and ' Princess 
Galva." Whitelaw's descriptions of Europe, by the 
way, are not based on what he has read. Anyone who 
has travelled can tell that. I know that on one occas- 
sion he went to Prague in order to be faithful in his 
description of a certain scene that was dealt with in 
only one chapter. 

" Finally, I am convinced that the humorous writer 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 137 

will be in the van for many generations. The writer 
who can make us laugh deserves his circulation. 

" I was in conversation with the editor of the 
1 Saturday Evening Post ' (Philadelphia) last year, 
and he confided in me : ' We never commission a story 
by anyone, but there is one writer who would tempt 
us to break our rule, and that is P. G. Wodehouse.' 
Well, I hate reading fiction of any sort, but I have a 
confession to make : I have read a story by Wode- 
house no fewer than three times, and I have laughed as 
heartily at the third reading as at the first." 



DION CLAYTON CALTHROP 



"I do not think that any writer is of any value unless 
he is first of all a story-teller," said Mr. Calthrop. 
" And a poet is also a story-teller. The average young 
writer does not read widely enough. Writing is 
absolutely united with the other arts. Writers ought to 
meet painters and go to their studios. As a writer is 
using humanity as his tools, and not pen and ink, which 
is merely the accident of writing, he ought to experience 
I think, every kind of emotion that he can lay hands on 
— because he has got to dissect it. He ought, that is, 
to believe in God, fairies and police-courts — the whole 
of life, in fact. And he must never lose his sense of 
wonder ; so that the arrival of letters in the morning 
is a daily miracle, and not a daily commonplace. 

" I think the finest test that a man can give his work 
is to see if he can interest a child of average intelligence 
for twenty minutes with a story of his own invention, 
because if a child finds him dull, so will the rest of the 
reading public. 

" My favourite mottoes are : ' There is no fun in the 
emetery ; bring me my flowers now ! ' and ' The 
world may appear to be a world of facts, but it is 
entirely governed by ideas.' 

" The moment a writer conceives of his desk as a 

138 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 139 

pulpit, he may know that he has completely failed in 
his mission. And he always ought to remember that 
hundreds of years before he was born people wrote 
better than he can ever hope to do. This really 
means that a man ought to have a library for his 
amusement and not for his instruction. 

" All artists are only lending the world a new pair 
of spectacles, just as Whistler first discovered that the 
Thames ran through London very beautifully, and as 
Jan Vermeer of Delft discovered that light of itself 
was very beautiful. Ugliness is only present in the 
world to show you how beautiful the world really 
is. 

" A book does not of itself belong to the author. 
If a man writes for his own pleasure, he need not write 
at all. He should write for the pleasure of other 
people, and lose himself in his work. Lots of books 
would be better if the author's name was not on the 
cover. 

" Really an author is only a mirror of his age, and 
unless he reflects what the rest of the world has only 
dimly seen, he forfeits the world's trust in him. A man 
is given a talent. He is only the individual who is 
given the use of public property. Therefore he must 
not lie, cheat, or swindle. 

" A printed book is a very dangerous thing, because 
you never know into whose hands it is going to fall. 
For that reason an author has no private life ; he is 
personally responsible for sending out printed words 
into the world. The author should remember, while 
he is writing, that if a perfectly innocent-minded boy 
or girl had eight shillings in their pockets and bought 
a book of his, he is entirely responsible for the effect of 
that book on their minds. 

" This does not mean that a man must write for the 
young person, but for the young person in himself, and 
people who are going to write fiction or indeed endea- 
vour to create anything, must remember that they are 



140 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

taking upon themselves a task which requires the 
whole of their mind, soul and body. 

" For it is the written word which differentiates us 
from the animals more than any other faculty we 
possess." 



W. E. NORRIS 



" The British novel is said to have seen its best days, 
and this may very likely be true," wrote Mr. W. E. 
Norris. " It saw the best of them in the Victorian 
era and the last of them at the expiration of the 
nineteenth century or perhaps a little earlier. When 
half a dozen or more monthly magazines published 
serial stories and the weekly illustrated papers did the 
same, the British novelist, receiving a good price for 
his serial as well as his book rights, was, pecuniarily 
speaking, in clover : now he seems to run some risk of 
being turned out to grass, like Nebuchadnezzar. 
Those excellent and useful magazines are defunct ; the 
public, it would appear, is no longer content to assimi- 
late its fiction by leisurely instalments. Why it ever 
was so content is something of a mystery ; but the 
vagaries and fluctuations of public taste are always 
mysterious. 

" When one is invited to forecast the novel's future 
one sees at once that the question should be whether 
the novel has a future, and that the answer must be that 
that inevitably depends upon whether the novel con- 
tinues to pay or not. Every art which has ceased to 
pay is doomed to perish for that reason, which any- 
body who likes is at liberty to call sordid. Some 
artists, literary, dramatic, pictorial and musical, no 

141 



142 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

doubt there will be who will practise their art for the 
sheer love of it ; but in these days of inflated prices 
and unbridled taxation the vast majority simply 
cannot afford to be so luxurious, and if they are 
unable to make a living by writing novels they will 
utilise their brains in some more profitable way. 

" We are told that the novel is destined to be 
extinguished by the film, which subserves a much 
more lucrative industry, and in so far as the film is the 
novel's competitor, its richer rewards would doubtless 
give it the upper hand. But does the film compete 
with the novel ? To my sense the two things are so 
distinct that neither can offer itself as a substitute for 
the other. Their affinity begins and ends with the fact 
that both are forms of relaxation. Hunting is a form 
of relaxation, games are a form of relaxation ; one 
resorts to them, as one resorts to novel-reading, in 
the hope of escaping for a time from the manifold 
worries of existence. One man wants to go out hunt- 
ing, another thinks he would like to read a book by 
the fireside ; it is not because the former's horse has 
dropped lame, while the library has failed to provide 
the latter with his desired book that they can agree to 
change places. Personally, I am rather fond of reading 
novels ; yet, in the not unfrequent event of my being 
unable to get hold of one that interests me, it does not 
enter into my head as an alternative to go out in the 
rain and visit a cinema show. I should prefer to fall 
back upon the newspapers. As a matter of fact, I 
suspect that the multiplication of daily and weekly 
newspapers constitutes the novelist's most formidable 
rival. Nevertheless, the novel remains so popular 
and is so convenient a vehicle of expression that its 
demise does not appear to be at all imminent. Whether 
out of the unceasing flood of fiction any works with a 
claim to rank as classics are likely to emerge is another 
question. The conditions, it has to be confessed, are 
not as favourable as they were half a century ago to 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 143 

the emergence of masterpieces. The general standard 
may be good — it is really quite as good as it ever was 
— but it cannot be said that any writer of to-day 
arrives at incontestable supremacy. The genus may 
be long-lived, but its constituent members enjoy but 
a very brief existence. Such is the hurry and press 
that the British novel, like the British battleship, 
begins to be obsolescent from the moment of its launch- 
ing. There is perhaps a danger that even the most 
capable author will not trouble to put his best work 
mto a production so ephemeral. On surveying his 
completed job, he will be apt to shrug his shoulders 
and say that, although it might have been a great deal 
better, it will do for its fugitive purpose. 

" Possibly, with the spread of education, coming 
generations will demand quality rather than quantity, 
and, should that demand be made, it is pretty sure to 
be met. We see what the actual public asks for, and 
what it asks for is obviously not literary distinction. 
But it appears probable that novels, good, bad, or 
indifferent, will always be called for and always pro- 
duced. Thus one reaches the conclusion that the novel 
in this country has a future, but what sort of a future 
time alone can show." 



UNA L. SILBERRAD 



When asked for her opinions on the future develop- 
ment of the novel, Miss Silberrad replied as follows : 

" On the subject of the future of the novel someone 
said to me the other day that it was reasonable to 
expect the taste of the future would be the same as 
the taste of the best educated, in the broad, not the 
literary sense, of to-day. I am bound to say the man 
who expressed this hopeful view was unable to say what 
was the taste of the best educated of to-day. — So am I. 

" You see, in novels there are what I call Critics' 
books and People's books : also Superior Persons' or 
Elect books and Best Sellers. The divisions rather 
overlap one another perhaps (except, of course, Superior 
Persons' books and Best Sellers.) Which really 
represents the taste of the best educated, in the 
broadest sense, I am not prepared to say. 

" Personally, I think all four classes will remain with 
us, education and my hopeful friend notwithstanding. 
There will, I expect, be Best Sellers in the future as 
to-day. Not the same as to-day ; the life of a Best 
Seller is not immense ; those of our youth are now 
somewhat as ' the snows of last winter ' — some irre- 
verent moderns may even say, like the snows, they have 
turnedj to slush. To-day has its own Best Sellers, 
different, but possessed of some salient characteristics 

H4 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 145 

in common with the past ones : the future, I rather 
fancy, will also. Those of the future will no doubt be 
different, but, unless human nature changes very much 
indeed, they will have some points the same, — unim- 
peachable sentiments, and plenty of them, — a strong 
love interest, a tendency to present the upper and upper 
middle rather than the lower classes (not necessarily 
with flawless accuracy), and to take the world and their 
public and themselves au grande serieuse. 

" I think, however, there may be more difference in 
what I call the Superior Persons' and Elect novels of 
the future. For one reason, exclusive ideas and 
fashions have a way of becoming general and common- 
place after a time, or else going out of date and looking 
rather like paper flowers and ball-room decorations in 
daylight. Also Earnest Youth, which makes up the 
most important part of the public of those books, grows 
older and — reads detective tales and the Victorians, or 
something else unesoteric. 

" The Youth of to-day is of necessity different from 
the youth of the last generation — which, by the way, was 
different from the generation before, though one is apt 
to forget that sometimes. It is reasonable to expect 
that the Youth of to-day will want different novels, 
different ' gospels/ different ' seers.' I think it is 
quite likely it will have no use for 400 pages of analysis 
of one character ; or for expositions in story form of 
the ambiguities of the divorce laws, or the details of 
sex instincts. I should think there is but little doubt 
it will demand new novels and have new points of view ; 
I will not venture to say what ; but it will almost cer- 
tainly demand and secure them, and break away from 
old fetishes and proclaim new geniuses. 

" But the novels produced to that demand will not 
be the whole of the novels of the future ; unless the 
future is very, very unlike the past. 

-■ After all, Youth is not the only novel reader ; there 
are the middle-aged and the old, the busy folk and the 



146 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

leisured, the lonely and the commonplace, and the 
thousands who just want People's books. I rather 
fancy there will be People's books in the future as in 
the past ; novels that tell a tale ; deal with life pretty 
much as it is ordinarily, leaving something to the 
imagination, and with a leaning towards the sunny 
side and the side of righteousness ; that have something 
of laughter in them, and sometimes tears, and always 
a touch of romance, historical or homely, of love or 
work or adventure — there are all sorts ; it always seems 
to me romance lies rather in the point of view than the 
facts. People's books have it in all sorts. 

" For my own part, I think there will always be 
novels of that kind, as there always have been. Not 
perhaps a fortune for their writers ; those who want 
and read them do not make much noise about it or 
advertise their favourites very greatly. The publishers 
do not make such a tremendous lot out of them, I am 
afraid, at least only very occasionally. But more than 
one second-hand bookseller can tell you of five and 
twenty and thirty shillings paid for shabby copies 
of novels fifteen years forgotten by the literary ; not 
by collectors, but by just ordinary people who knew 
and loved them as friends." 



MRS. ALFRED SIDGWICK 



" Many years ago/' wrote Mrs. Sidgwick, " a great 
foreign actress told me that she was sorry she had not 
been born English. I asked her why, and with evident 
surprise at my stupidity, she pointed out that if she 
had been, she would have had the English speaking 
world for her audience. Even in those days, the 
English-speaking world was a large one, and it has been 
growing ever since, and is still growing. For instance, 
I found each year in Italy that English was the fashion- 
able language. Since the war it has ousted German. 
Therefore Italy should soon become one of our many 
markets, and learn a little more about us than it 
knows now : for in the summer of 1920 I saw nothing 
newer in the hands of Italians than ' Misunderstood,' 
while in the bookshops of a great city like Genoa 
modern English literature was represented by a few 
writers whose names I had never heard and have now 
forgotten. I am told that English is fashionable in 
Germany too, but I cannot vouch for that personally. 
" Anyhow there is no doubt that from the commercial 
point of view, if you mean to write novels, you had 
better be English. Having settled the question of 
your birth, your next step will be to choose your public, 
and this is less easy : for, according to the ultimate 
subtleties of your temperament, environment, and 

147 



148 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

education, your public will choose you. Once upon a 
time there was only one reading public and that was a 
small one. Most people had to listen to their stories 
being said or sung by bards and minstrels. But to-day 
all kinds and classes can read and they know what they 
want. This fact and the fact that the English language 
is overrunning the globe must affect the future of the 
novel, because markets must affect output. Those 
' best sellers ' that some of us cannot read will have 
bigger and bigger circulations, and, as long as they 
are not evil, good luck to them. I know a true story 
of a popular author whose works were to be found on 
every bookstall and in every kitchen. The most 
amiable and harmless of men, he was reproached by 
some curmudgeon with writing sugary slush, ' But I 
do my best,' he pleaded : and explained one secret of 
his success. There is no greater mistake than to think 
that a man not born to be a ' best seller ' can make 
himself one with his tongue in his cheek. The great 
heart of the public will find him out and cease to beat for 
him. In the English-speaking world of to-day there 
are publics of all sorts and sizes : and good work is 
sure of recognition, although it will naturally not have 
as wide a sale as the mediocre and the melodramatic. 
For it seems unreasonable to admit that the greater 
portion of the public, high-born and low-born, is half 
educated and yet be surprised and angered by its 
choice of books. 

" At the same time the spread of knowledge tends to 
specialisation. You have to know what you are writing 
about now ; which is cramping, because most of us 
know so little. Still, if we are careful we need not let 
a colt win the Oaks, or people a desert island with 
leopards and kangaroos. In a sense, too, we all know 
more than we can ever give about the life common to us 
all. Hunger, love, friendship, anger, pain ; who has 
not experienced them and who can describe their 
realities ? But of such stuff the novel must be made 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 149 

and I see in the future every sort and condition of men 
making it. Certainly the miner will show us as in a 
mirror his life in mines, the sailor will take us to sea, 
the dressmaker to her workshop,; but as of old, the 
poet and the genius, his lance tipped with flame, will 
take us everywhere. 

" They come wi* news of the groaning earth, 

They come wi' news of the roaring sea, 
Wi' word of Spirit and Ghost and Flesh 

And man, that's mazed amongst the three." 
And I, being a hardened and voracious reader say — 
1 Let them all come. There can never be too many — 
they can never be too various, provided they can stir 
me to laughter and to tears.' " 



E. TEMPLE THURSTON 



" I feel I am one of the last to be asked for an opinion 
on so venturesome a subject as the future of the novel," 
said Mr. Temple Thurston, " seeing that at the very 
outset I must admit I am not a student of the modern 
novel — the novel of the present — the novel as it is. 
How then, with any justification, can I predict its 
future ? For the novel, almost supplanting all other 
forms of literature, has become the foremost vehicle 
in that progressive procession of thought which 
expresses the moral and spiritual life of a people. To 
forecast its future is as hazardous a venture as to 
prophesy what government will be in power fifty years 
hence, or whether or no we shall count England 
amongst the republics. 

" One might launch into endless speculation about 
the future of the novel, but one thing seems certain. 
The spread of education will force the novelist into 
wider conceptions of his subject, into a more compre- 
hensive choice of his material than he has hitherto 
determined upon. Such writers as Mr. Arnold Bennett, 
Mr. Beresford, Mr. Swinnerton, Mr. Cannan, have 
shown us the way in this, and .where he cannot be linked 
with them, Mr. Hugh Walpole has added a sense of 
magic to the realities of life which his books have 
re-created. 

150 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 151 

" It is, I believe, in this sense that the future of the 
novel offers most prospect, if not necessarily hope, of 
evolution. And this is no more than saying that I 
believe people have lost much of the sense of the magic 
of life and will in time regain it. The novelist, unless he 
is a genius, will be there to record it. I assume I am 
not called upon to foretell what any genius may do. 
He is before his time and after it. He is the 
sudden voice of all time and speaks when he must. 
The novelist, the painter, the musician, they speak at 
regulated intervals, just as the spirit of their time 
dictates. 

" To venture any opinion, then, upon the trend of 
modern thought is to predict what the future of the 
novel may be, and this it seems to me is the tendency 
of human emotion which is the motive power, the 
pounds pressure throwing up the fountain spray of all 
thought. Human nature is not crying out to ignore 
the realities of life, but eagerly it is seeking for some 
illuminating translation of those realities into a more 
beautiful meaning to existence. 

" The modern novelist — and this, I believe, is why 
he has no grip for me — allows but a poor meaning to 
life. The future novelist has all scope here, if but the 
trend of thought and higher idealism so happen to 
dictate for him. I hope I do not offend him — the 
novelist — when I persist he is no more than a servant 
of his time — a recorder. For as one looks at the 
growth of the novel it appears significantly beside the 
growth of journalism. One has only to pick up any 
present-day newspaper, with the prominence of its 
murder, suicide and divorce reports, to realise that one 
can distinguish but a dirty meaning to life, and such 
meaning as there is, the novelist is bound to reiterate. 

"I do not mean to infer that the novelist is the 
product of modern journalism. In defence of myself 
and others I would declare he was better than that. 
He is, it seems to me, the poet, the man of letters 



152 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

turned reporter, with that self-concealed, self-ennobled 
ambition to give the public what it wants. 

" What a future there is for him in his novels, to 
come up out of the muddy levels of Fleet Street and, 
if in that locality be his dwelling, do no more than 
climb up to the parapet of St. Paul's ! 

" For it is extraordinary how different is your 
vision as step by step you mount higher to a higher 
view-point. Doubtless the journalist must remain 
in Fleet Street. His printing presses are there with 
all their importunate clamouring for new and ready 
material. One can hear the sound of that machinery in 
so many of the novels that one reads. No poet ever 
heard it. A man of letters, like G. K. Chesterton, can 
sit in a Fleet Street tavern, oblivious of the grinding 
of its wheels, waving his pen about in the air in time 
to the tune of his own fancy. 

"lam asked, and so I will say, that this might be 
the future of the novel, that it should recapture the 
poet's vision together with that grace and reverence for 
the language in which he writes, which is the virtue of 
the man of letters." 



E. F. BENSON 



" Possibly a fine novel may have a purpose," said 
Mr. E. F. Benson. " A purpose need not spoil a novel, 
if it only acts as a spur to the author's own imagina- 
tion. But the reader ought to be quite unconscious 
of it. 

" When anyone says a novel is ' true to life,' you 
may expect to find a very tedious work. No one 
wants a novel to be true to life. Take David Copper- 
field. There is hardly a character in the book which 
bears the slightest resemblance to a real person. But 
that is why they are all bubbling with literary reality. 

" Take the best biography ever written, Boswell. 
With all the immense detail about Johnson, he would 
hardly make more than a minor character in a novel. 

" Books have been getting longer, duller, and more 
true to life every year, just as if the author confused the 
real with the actual. He traces the plotting history 
of some group of bores ; . . They are not flesh 
and blood, but cold meat. . . 

" A novel ought to distract you. After reading 
anything worth reading, real people should seem 
shadows, lacking the reality of fiction. Most novels 
to-day make you feel that you have been paying a 
series of dull calls. If a novel doesn't amuse you, it 
fails as a novel. . . (Take ' Vanity Fair ,'— We all 



154 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 
leave out Amelia and Dobbin, and turn on to more 
Becky Sharp). . . And the author must be amused 
at his own puppets, or they will assuredly not amuse 
anybody else. 

" The great crime is dullness : we have no moral 
sense (or should have none) when reading a novel. 
We are amused and entranced with Mr. Squeers, who 
must have been a very cruel gentleman, and fall in 
love with Fanny Squeers. 

" The great misfortune at the present moment is 
that publishers are shy of new writers, owing to the 
prices of paper, etc. We only get the works of the old 
hacks who have been at it for ten years or more. 

" There are some slight signs that the public are 
jibbing at the sermons. Humour, satire, fantasy, are 
attracting more notice. You may write about people 
who live in country villages and are engrossed in minute 
affairs, but these minute affairs have to appear as 
matters of transcendental importance, not because 
they are, but because they are humorously presented. 

" Millions of excellently written novels, with every 
grace of style, every device of technique, are all quite 
unreadable, in spite of their impeccable grammar. 
They are swamped in actuality, and have not one bubble 
of reality about them." 



JEFFERY FARNOL 



" I think that judged from our modern standpoint the 
great authors of the past are very wearisome, unless 
one is in the psychological mood to turn over endless 
pages of their lucubrations/' said Mr. Farnol. 

" The modern idea is directness, both of thought 
and of action. Everything points to the fact that the 
older and fuller one's experience gets, the less time one 
has to devote to the byways of life and art. Hence, if 
I have a thought to tell, I tell it in a poignantly 
appealing and as direct a fashion as I can. Of course 
there are times when one wants to create an atmosphere, 
when one is at liberty to do so in a round about or direct, 
mystic or material way, according to the attitude of 
mind the author wishes his reader to adopt. 

" That is one of the reasons why I think that a certain 
type of American picture producer has struck the 
right note, strangely enough, by choosing music, both 
before and during the picture-show, which will help to 
stir the beholder's imagination through his senses. 
The idea of an atmosphere is to my mind one of the 
most essential things in any constructive or creative 
work. And of course, first and foremost, above and 
beyond everything else, the author must be sincere. 

" Creative art is at the same time the most selfish 

155 



156 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

and the most utterly unselfish thing there is in the 
world ; selfish in that no true artist will ever suffer 
anything to go from him, or from his pen, that does not 
please and satisfy himself and his judgment, irrespec- 
tive of censure, praise or ridicule ; and unselfish, from 
the fact that in creating, self becomes entirely forgotten 
and merged in the accomplishment of the work the 
artist is engaged upon. 

" Inspiration for the writer is in itself a thing 
so utterly nebulous and indescribable, that there is an 
awful lot of humbug talked about it. I have often 
despaired of rounding out to its true proportion some 
idea which I have wished to incarnate in my charac- 
ters. I have waited for days, sometimes weeks, for an 
inspiration. Though, on the other hand, I think that 
determination to overcome the difficulty, backed with 
sheer hard work that refuses to be baulked by high- 
brow ideas, will ultimately win through — and the 
result is what is called inspiration. 

" I believe that as man progresses, he loves more 
and more to be appealed to through his intellect, but 
as long as man is human he will love best the book that 
appeals to his heart." 



GORDON GASSERLY 



" The novel certainly has a future," said Lieut. -Col. 
Gordon Casserly in an interview. " Other brands of 
literature may die, but Fiction will remain as long as 
the human race endures. The time may come when 
poetry will cease to charm a world grown too prosaic, 
books of travel be no more written in an age when every 
corner of the globe will be known to all, when the 
working man will fly from his home in Kent to his 
daily task in New York and spend his week-ends in 
Central Africa or Thibet. Scientific books may be 
penned no more when Science will have no marvels 
left unrevealed. But while Man is Man — even truer, 
while Woman is Woman — Fiction will endure. 

" Probably the first romancer was Adam — when he 
explained to Eve why he stayed out at night. The 
Cave Man, scratching his hairy hide, forgot to gnaw 
his bone as he listened enthralled to the novelist's 
forerunner. I have seen in Eastern bazaars from 
Cairo to Pekin the circle" of fascinated hearers grouped 
around the Teller of Stories. And Present joins Past, 
West meets East when the errand-boy devours his 
shocker and the milliner's apprentice reads her 
fourpenny novel in the tube. 

" Fiction began with the human race ; and it will 

157 



158 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

only end with Mankind. To the end of time the woman 
will seek in it the romance that is ever dear to her sex 
and that perhaps has been denied to her in real life. 
And men as well as women will always turn to it for 
relaxation after work, for oblivion in unhappiness, for 
amusement in an idle hour, whether it be in the form 
of words flowing from the lips of a bazaar teller of 
tales, or the printed page. Those who suffered years 
of misery in prison camps, endured the monotony of 
service in dreary desert or frontier posts, or lay weary 
months in hospitals, will never forget what a godsend 
a novel, any novel, was to them — when they could get 
one 

"So to the end fiction will hold its own. To the 
dweller in drab surroundings, the toiler in dull, mono- 
tonous work, it opens the gate of Fairyland and trans- 
ports them to new realms where Romance and Adven- 
ture await them. 

" But a time may come when the novel in book 
form as we know it may be found only in museums. 
The marvellous apparatus that will replace the 
gramophone and the cinematograph will tell a story to 
the ear, and show it in moving picture to the eye, of 
the fortunate successor of the novel reader of to-day. 

" Will the fiction of the future be better than ours ? 
Undoubtedly. As superior as the masterpieces of 

Dickens, Thackeray or (here insert the name of 

your favourite author) are to the dull novels of the 
eighteenth century. 

" Cleaner too. English women-novelists who, while 
living blameless lives, are yet responsible for the 
majority of the novels in our language to-day that have 
immoral or sensual tendencies, will, as existence for 
women becomes freer, broader, learn to give up the 
writing of purposelessly morbid or unhealthy books on 
sex-questions and sex-relationships. 

" Probably the readers — should I say, the read-to ? 
— of the future may demand more from the novel than 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 159 

they do to-day. They may ask, not only to be amused, 
but also to be instructed, desire to learn something 
worth knowing, to add a little to their stock of know- 
ledge. We can see a tendency to this in the growing 
distaste of the cinema-goer to the stupid film. 

" The Novel as we know it, came late into English 
literature, but it came to stay." 



JOHN COURNOS 



" The art of the Novel has a brilliant past ; a hard, 
transitional present ; a magnificent future," remarked 
Mr. Cournos. 

" The past can speak for itself. 

" The present is hard because it is difficult for an 
artist brought up in the pre-war world to adjust 
himself to the after- war world. In a world in which 
nothing happened the petty existences of people were 
interesting ; in the new world, in which big, stirring 
events happen every day, petty affairs must necessarily 
find their proper place, become submerged. I, for 
one, cannot understand the novelist who makes a great 
ado about the opening or the shutting of a window, or 
the buying of a packet of pins. The vast design of life 
takes cognizance of fleeting impressions ; but these 
in themselves do not make life. This absurd obsession 
with the infinitesimal particles of life is a part of the 
common disintegrating processes experienced to-day 
by the great human community. The novel, as well 
as life, is dominated by values of inflated currency. 
Psycho-analysis is another disintegrating factor in 
the present-day novel. Art, it has been commonly 
admitted, arises from the sub-conscious in man, from 
man's repressed energy, for which art is one of the 

160 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 161 

outlets. The new science presumes to make conscious 
what is naturally sub-conscious. This constitutes a 
real danger to art, as it tends to kill spontaneity, by 
placing all human emotions on a medico-scientific 
basis. If a poet were told that he writes his poetry 
not because of great natural emotions but because of 
his grandmother's suppressed criminal instincts, he 
would not want to write poetry any more, but more 
likely be moved by a desire to kill his grandmother. 
For the artist it is more profitable to taste of the fruit 
of the tree of life than of the tree of knowledge. The 
artist who surrenders to science destroys his art. As 
the Great War has proved, the fate of the worshipper 
of Juggernaut is the fate of the worshipper of the 
Machine. Of late I have repeatedly reflected upon 
those profoundly prophetic words of Blake : ' Science 
(i.e., knowledge), the tree of death. Art, the tree of 
life.' Their meaning is peculiarly significant 
to-day. 

" The future is full of promise. An art which is 
destroying itself is making a place for a new art, just 
as the life which is destroying itself is making place for 
new life. After destruction there is much to do. The 
chaos is great, and order must be created. The artist, 
above all, loves putting things in order, creating 
harmonies out of chaos. Life has been abundant these 
recent years, and abundance in life makes for abun- 
dance in art. When life is lacking, artists go in for pure 
forms, for ' art for art's sake.' But a rich art can only 
come from rich materials. The history of man, the 
history of art, support me in this. Man's adventure 
is always reflected in his art 'The history of art is the 
history of man,' says a great Frenchman, Elie Faure, 
whose work should be universally known. Phoenicia, 
a commercial nation, left no art. Great novels will be 
written as soon as men can get their proper bearings 
after the typhoon. Perspective is always essential to 
an artist for a tranquil judgment of the human adven- 



162 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

ture. The heroic, striving figure of man will then 
resume its natural place on the literary and artistic 
horizon. My only regret is that I belong to a genera- 
tion that was born too soon." 



G. COLBY BORLEY 



" I think that the future of the novel depends very 
largely upon the novelist's ability to liberate himseif 
from its present and its immediate past," said Mr. 
Borley, the author of a promising first novel, " The 
Last Horizon," published by Messrs. Methuen. " I 
use this latter term advisedly, to cover a period of 
half a century or thereabouts — the period of the 
so-called Reaction against Victorianism. 

" I have no wish to deny the intrinsic greatness 
of this period in English or in European literature. 
Much of its achievement was magnificent — within 
its limits. But it was fatally self-centred, peevish, 
and inexpansive ; intoxicated with its own peculiar 
ideas. And it was pervaded and perverted by a 
certain fixed idea which I am going to call the Dogma 
of Disillusion. 

" It started during the seventies and eighties, 
when all sorts of people seemed to be discovering 
that the world of the Mid-Victorians was full of 
make-believes. Just the same might fairly be said 
of any particular generation, notably of the very 
generation which made this discovery. But these 
critics were far too cultured to know much about 
history or the past. Being equally ' shaky ' as to 
logic, they speedily jumped to the conviction that 

163 



164 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

life itself is a make-believe. Hence the militant 
Dogma of Disillusion. All the intellectuals of the 
day became disillusioned because they were jolly 
well determined to be disillusioned. (Matthew Arnold 
should be excepted — he was a rational Disillusionist) . 
The thing developed into a fashionable intoxication. 
So long as Mr. Hardy led the rout it preserved a sort 
of melancholy beauty which, in the hands of Mr. 
Conrad — the nearest approach to a ' live ' man 
amongst the Disillusionists — has culminated in gran- 
deur. But, with the coming of Mr. Shaw — the evil 
genius, if genius he can be called, of contemporary 
English literature — the entire cult degenerated. The 
attitude of dignified unhappiness gave place to the 
grin of contempt — a sophisticated contempt of nearly 
everything that is elemental in art, of passion, of 
romance, of action and adventure, of science, of 
poetry itself. The Younger Novelists followed, and 
there was a tussle between this so-called ' Shavian 
Commonsense ' and a sort of hectic reaction. But 
the ' note of disillusion,' sounded exultantly at every 
impressive opportunity, is always the common chord 
of reconciliation. 

" What is the reason of this depressing unanimity ? 
The explanation is tolerably simple. We have only to 
glance at that extraordinary middle-class intelligentsia 
which has largely controlled the development of the 
serious novel in England for the last thirty years. 
You will find it in its most rarined shape in the in- 
tellectual suburbs of Chelsea and Golders Green. 
It has somehow evolved a culture which is totally 
divorced from education. Indeed, it will often tell 
you quite openly that its only concern is with liter- 
ature and art — meaning the literature and art of 
the last fifty vears. It has swallowed the various 
cants and foibles and shams and ' disillusions ' of 
that rather stuffy period so voraciously that it seems 
to have lost the open air altogether. Its men, and 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 165 

more particularly its women — and most of all, per- 
haps, its poets and novelists — are much of a kind 
with the peasant of Northern France who never 
dreams of setting foot beyond his visible horizon, 
and asks you gravely if Abbeville is very much smaller 
than Paris. 

" Now I think that the future Novelist must learn 
to ignore this hothouse Intelligentsia. That much 
is vital. And he can do with a great deal less culture 
and a great deal more solid education. Above 
everything else, the Dogma of Disillusion must go 
to the scrap-heap. Art, like science, is naturally 
an adventurous business, and it cannot long subsist 
on passive impulses. Indeed, this modern attempt 
to harness the creative spirit to the mood of resigna- 
tion and ' disillusion ' is one of the wildest paradoxes 
of an age that has been superabundant in paradox. 
But if we want to escape it we must get right away 
from the later nineteenth century. 

" Some will tell you, no doubt, that the way of 
escape has already been discovered by the Futurists. 
But the Futurists are in truth, the very extremists 
among the Disillusionists. They are so very dis- 
illusioned that they have despaired of beauty and 
expect us to ' will ' a new sort of ugly beauty for 
ourselves — a beauty that is only accessible to the 
intellect. They are the poorest among the paradox- 
mongers and about the most unhealthy. 

" I believe that we may find a stronger and better 
inspiration from the greater human achievements 
of the present age. There is the tremendous fact 
of a War which everyone has experienced — which 
has thrown the life of every civilized individual 
against a universal background of unprecedented 
lights and shadows. There is the lesser, yet still 
stupendous, fact that men have crossed the Atlantic 
and the Pacific in flying-machines. The Disillusionists 



166 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

and their novelists do not notice such things. They 
are still content with the Village Novel (after Thomas 
Hardy), the Novel-about-an-Artist, the novel of 
the unhealthy schoolboy or the undesirable school- 
girl. But the novelist of the future will have to 
wake up, or he may find that even the Intelligentsia 
are ahead of him." 






EDWIN PUGH 



" For many years," said Mr. Edwin Pugh, " I have 
been trying to like the cinema, and wondering all 
the while why I could not. Its reproductions of real 
fine stories are of course abominations of desolation. 
But I have often laughed at its simple humours, 
and been even a little stirred by some of its more 
thrilling dramas. And yet it has always been the 
same. I have always come away from the cinema 
feeling somehow depressed, almost with a sense of 
horror. 

" And a little while ago I discovered why this was 
so. There is no life or colour in the cinema. All 
the scenes are painted in the same sad sombre tints. 
All the actors are corpses, gruesomely galvanic, 
ghastly in their uniform pallor and dumbness. 

" And so it is, or so it seems to me, with most 
modern novels. They too are without life and colour. 
The characters do not talk to me like men and women 
of flesh and blood, but mouth at me dumbly. The> 
behave, not as human beings behave, but as puppets 
set in an artificial light, doing artificial things, feeling 
artificial emotions. 

" The literary merit in the average modern novel 
is high. Many of them are extraordinarily clever. 
There is wit in some of them, though humour is far 

167 



168 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

to seek in most. They are skilfully, deftly, often 
brilliantly written. And yet they seem all to suffer 
from that fatal lack of what I will call in default of a 
better word, humanness. They group themselves. 
There are ' sob ' stories, the wild life stories, unreal 
stories of the Tarzan type, stories of an occult, mystic 
flavour, and — worst of all ! — closely-wrought studies 
of people, real enough but wholly abnormal. There 
are, of course, many other brands of modern novel, 
mostly conventional, but these I have stated should 
serve our purpose well enough. 

" Now there is hardly a living novelist, except 
perhaps among the women, who does not derive 
from Dickens. And Dickens, as in his own day, 
is still supreme among English novelists. He is 
still the most widely read of novelists ; which is to 
say that in every grade and order of social life there 
are thousands who still find enjoyment in his books. 
And I think that the secret of his power lies in his 
dealing with types rather than with individuals. 

" The old wearisome charge against Dickens that 
his characters are not so much types as caricatures 
has long since ceased to interest me. He made them 
live, anyway. Even those who may never have read 
a line of his works are always quoting from them, 
unconsciously. This is inevitable because Dickens 
grasped the fact that though no two men are exactly 
alike there are groups of individuals who do closely 
approximate to one another. He welded each of 
these groups into one colossal figure and so created 
for us a handy symbol for them all. And he treated 
great national institutions, such as the Circum- 
locution Office, in precisely the same way. 

" Therefore the future of the novel seems to me to 
consist in the revival of these great traditions. The 
novel of the future must handle things and people, 
the humours and the dolours of life, its pains and 
triumphs, and above all its ideals, in the same massive 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 169 
style. It must be spacious and leisurely. It must be 
long — the longer the better, and it must reflect not 
one phase but many phases of the human comedy. 
The future novelist must not be afraid to let himself 
go. Never mind incidental mistakes ; all masterpieces 
are crammed with mistakes ; it is only mediocre 
work that is faultless. 

" The nearer it approaches the robustious methods 
and free gestures of the past-masters in fiction, the 
further it will get away from the colourlessness, 
bloodlessness, and deathly silence of the cinema. 

" And it might even be issued in weekly or monthly 
parts at the various prices of admission to the cinema." 



MARWIN DELGAROL 

" There are three main forms of novel," said Marwin 
Delcarol (author of a striking first novel about Rein- 
carnation, ' Fire and Water'). " The first is the 
novel designed purely for amusement and relaxation. 
The second reflects knowledge, thus providing vicarious 
experiences. And the third mirrors some philoso- 
phical or artistic ideal which the author wishes to 
convey to the public. A great novel ought to combine 
at least two of these aspects, and should never be 
untrue to the author's conception of life. 

" I think that the novel of the future must take 
into consideration the study of those wider planes 
of consciousness which humanity is gradually and 
painfully learning to conquer. It is probable that 
spiritualism and modern psychology will play much 
more vital and inspiring parts in the future, when 
they have divested themselves of their present sordid 
and illusive trappings. 

" Fiction when it has not represented the truth 
has done a great deal of harm. For instance, by 
creating impossible ideals it has been responsible for 
an enormous number of unhappy marriages. The fiction 
of the future will have the same responsibility, and 
should therefore realise the important function it 
plays in setting standards and creating new values. 

170 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 171 

" Whatever else it may be, fiction must be creative. 
It must create ideas which are both essential in them- 
selves and essential to progress. Otherwise it may 
lay a dangerous emphasis upon things which have no 
universal value and which are merely isolated examples 
of a capricious fantasy. 

"I do not wish to imply that the term ' reality ' 
should be limited to the accepted experience of even 
the majority of mankind. What may appear nonsense 
to some, may nevertheless be perfectly real and the 
mainspring of life to others. And if we desire to 
extend knowledge we cannot afford to neglect any 
aspect of truth. 

" The aim of the novel of the future should be to 
make life as a whole accessible to each individual, 
and thus to give to all the material out of which to 
construct a new conception of life." 



CHARLOTTE MANSFIELD, F.R.G.S. 



Mrs. Charlotte Mansfield was the first woman 
to lecture in Rhodesia in 1909, the subject of the 
lecture being " Ward Pictures." Besides two books 
of poems and a book of travel (" Via Rhodesia ") 
Mrs. Mansfield is the author of nine novels. She is 
the only white woman who has penetrated into 
certain parts of Africa, and has met with many 
adventures in the course of her travels. 

In a recent interview, Mrs. Mansfield remarked 
that the African native who has remained uninfluenced 
by Western civilisation, is one of nature's gentlemen. 
For months at a time she has travelled alone with 
a group of natives, some of whose parents were 
cannibals, through the most inaccessible regions of 
Africa, hundreds of miles distant from any civilised 
centre, and never once has she had cause for com- 
plaint. 

When invited to express her opinions on the future 
of the novel Mrs. Mansfield said she did not think 
that the full value of the novel for propaganda pur- 
poses had yet been realised. 

" There is a likelihood," she continued, " of novels 
being more classified in the future. I say novels, 
not novelists; for the writer who can only create 
one kind of novel is sadly lacking in imagination, 

172 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 173 

although repetition may mean popularity for a time 
and a good bank balance. 

" Because the basis of life is love, the chief reason 
for the existence of novels must always be the interest 
or curiosity human beings have in the love stories 
of other human beings, but in addition to a strong 
love interest, the better educated, or the more highly 
inquisitive, will require not only a love story out 
also forgotten history, little known geography, or 
psychology of exceptional humans, described so that 
one may study life in a palatable form and without 
great expense. 

" Kings and queens as an institution may pass 
away (though I sincerely hope not) ; Governments 
may fall ; women may become judges of the Supreme 
Court, and men may yet advertise for engagements 
as nursery men, not of the agricultural or horticultural 
order ; but let the surface of life change as it will, 
the novel will never pass into oblivion until love is 
dead and this earth passes into a state of nothingness. 

" Which writers will live in the future ? Those 
who have hearts as well as brilliant minds. This 
discussion is of novels and novelists, not of playwriters, 
otherwise I would feel inclined to illustrate what I 
mean by saying Shakespeare will live for ever, Shaw 
will not even be remembered fifty years hence (except 
perhaps by a few dilettantes) ; Dickens will live, Oscar 
Wilde will not even be quoted. 

" One may be amused or entertained for a few hours 
by certain writers who are merely contrary in order 
to provoke comment, but as no one really cares if 
their heroes or heroines live or die, so no one will 
mind when the hands that weave these unnatural 
romances are for ever still. 

" Any writer, to be remembered, must suffer while 
writing, must feel laughter with the merry and weep 
bitter tears with those who grieve ; readers may 
mock at the affected, simpering miss of yesterday, 



174 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

or the fire-eating, whiskered hero of the day before, 
but real tragedy and genuine comedy know neither 
time nor age. The past, present and future of deep 
feeling is the same for all generations, though clothed 
differently, and makes its imprint on the annals of 
life and literature, never to become that which is 
not. 

" This being so, the responsibility of the novelist 
is very great. It is not enough that one is a ' best 
seller ' or a ' success ' amongst the cultured few. 
Each writer in striving for the ideal and the strength 
to sincerely accomplish that ideal legitimately, may, 
with each drop of ink, help to tint the future of the 
world's history in such a way as to compass the 
space twixt earth and heaven and, in a measure, 
bridge the great abyss." 



F. BRETT YOUNG 



"To begin with," wrote Mr. Brett Young, "it 
will be as well to decide if the English novel has a 
future of any kind. Members of the literary coteries 
who instruct our taste now spend their time in pro- 
phesying its demise, and as all these clever young 
men not only write novels but read them and review 
them, they are probably better informed on the 
subject than an author who lives out of the reach 
of new books and has never reviewed a novel in his 
life. For all that, I am prepared to back my opinion 
that the novel will survive, if only on biological grounds. 
Like all persistent organisms it is blessed with the 
power of adaptation. In spite of the nonsense that 
has been written about the form of the novel, it is 
not, and never has been, an art-form of a set type. 
The people who pontificate in the reviews as to what a 
novel should be, might read, with advantage, de 
Maupassant's preface to ' Pierre et Jean.' Originally 
a defence of realism as practised by himself and his 
friends, it gives a complete answer to those critics 
who are perpetually pestering English novelists to 
imitate the distinguished foreigners who, in their 
opinion, possess the monopoly of ' form.' It states, 
to begin with, that the novel, which, in this country 

175 



176 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

has already usurped part of the provinces which 
once belonged to the essay and the epic, may contain 
anything that its author chooses to express in accor- 
dance with his personal conception of art ; that there 
are no rules for writing novels, and that all the en- 
lightened critic or reader asks is this : ' Make me 
something beautiful in the form that suits you best 
according to your temperament.' The man who is 
going to give us the novel of the future is not in need 
of this advice. He will do it, and those who are not 
deafened by the shibboleths of the moment will 
hear him. 

" The second reason why I believe the English 
novel will survive, is that it is a form of artistic ex- 
pression particularly suited to our national genius — 
that it stands already on the basis of a great tradition, 
and that English novelists, for all the discontent 
of contemporary writers, have produced during the 
last two hundred years a greater body of significant 
work of this kind than any others in Europe. This 
is an age of speed ; but that is no excuse for impatience 
or hysteria in criticism. Great novelists are as rare, 
almost, as great poets, and not even the greatest 
can be relied upon to produce a masterpiece every 
few years. Nor will criticism hasten the production 
of masterpieces by being in a hurry. In his proper 
time the next great novelist will come. 

" So much for the future of the novel. As for the 
shape which the novel of the future will take, one 
cannot speak with the same confidence. One thing 
at least is sure. We need not be dependent for our 
models on — I quote from Max Beerbohm's essay 
on Luntic Kolnyatsch — ' the seemingly inexhaustible 
supply of anguished souls from the Continent — 
infantile, wide-eyed Slavs, Titan Teutons, greatly 
blighted Scandinavians, all of them different, but 
all of them raving in one common darkness, and 
with one common gesture plucking out their vitals 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 177 

for exportation,' for this fare has become rather 
monotonous and the English palate is tired of it. 
Gloom and strength are not, after all, synonymous ; 
Freud (if he is necessary to our salvation) is better 
read in the original than in the form of fiction ; and 
though the high-brows who scotched the Repertory 
Theatre have done their worst to inflict their con- 
vention of drabness on the novel, I think they have 
failed. In the same way, minute descriptions of 
storms in suburban and provincial tea-cups do not 
seem likely any longer to thrill men and women who 
have weathered the tempest of war ; and along with 
them, I hope, is gone the finicking absorption in 
technique with which the poverty of their material 
and their real unimportance was, sometimes skilfully, 
concealed. For an adulation of extreme technical 
accomplishment is, after all, a fin-de-siecle phenomenon 
in Literature, and to-day we believe we stand at the 
Beginning of an Age. The novelist of yesterday 
had enough technique and to spare. What he needed 
was a richer and more varied experience of life, and 
in these years of war, God knows ! men have lived as 
fully and as vividly as did the Elizabethans. They 
have seen human souls and bodies bent beneath 
insufferable stresses ; millions of them have known 
strange countries and seen, mingled with the filth of 
war, new and amazing beauties in sea and air and land. 
The men of the generation that is going to write the 
novel of the immediate future have suffered ; for them 
the horizon of life has been terrifically expanded ; 
and the fruits of their suffering and their vision will 
be seen in their work. The novel will gain in colour 
and in action : things from which the critics of ' before 
the war ' shrank with a kind of false shame. No 
doubt the new novelist will be accused of violence, 
sensationalism and vulgarity by those whose vision 
is limited by the radius of the District Railway ; 
but these accusations will not deter him from writing 



178 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

of the wider (not merely geographically wider) aspects 
of beauty that he has seen ; and, in doing this, he will 
have become the unconscious instrument of the Roman- 
tic Revival which follows, as day follows night, 
every critical, non-creative period in the history 
of Literature. I have no gift of prophesy ; but this 
is what I believe will happen. As to the commercial 
furture of the novel, I do not know anything. I wish 
I did." 



LOUIS GOLDING 



" It must be difficult,' ' said Mr. Golding, "for a 
novelist who has already perfected himself in a 
technique and definitely mapped out a line of country 
as his own, not to allow his own achievement to con- 
trol his attitude towards the general future of the 
novel. It will be difficult for him to resist feeling — 
if he is a novelist, let us instance, of ' locality,' such 
as Mr. Hardy, Mr. Phillpotts or Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith 
— the novel will takes its course until every ' locality ' 
has its novelist. Thereafter the literary spirit must 
invent new forms. The last novel will at length 
have been written. 

" I am of course far from suggesting that this is 
anything like an actual or conscious intellectual 
attitude with such novelists as I have mentioned, 
or even with novelists with more illusions and less 
craft than they. I wish merely to suggest that so 
intensely is a good artist following his own path that 
unless he is extremely circumspect he will tend to 
mistake it for the broad high-road. 

" For this reason, therefore, I think it is necessary 
to divorce oneself, in a consideration of the future 
of the novel, from the cult of one's own place and time. 
The novel., after all, is not a sporadic manifestation 

179 



i8o THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

unaccountable to laws. It occupies as definite a 
place in the history of a nation's literature as the 
rude chants of its barbarian originators. A literature 
would seem to begin with the lyric, to pass by way 
of the drama to the novel, and it is my conviction 
that it attains its literary consummation in a synthesis 
of the ' lyric-spirit ' and the ' novel-spirit ' (cumbrous 
though these words be) so that the beginnings and the 
ends meet. Such evidently was the nature of the 
Greek and Latin developments — from the lyric to 
the drama and thence, in the magnificent, if corrupt 
flowering of their worlds, the novel. Precisely such 
a masterpiece as the ' Satyricon ' of Petronius, a 
work so arrogant in its intellectual splendour, marks 
the synthesis of the primal lyric and the ultimate 
novel. Surely it was because neither Greek nor Latin 
literature was historically allowed to fulfil its whole 
development that so little of this ' literature of finality ' 
was achieved. 

" For the fact seems to be that the artist in the 
early stages of a national literature is composed of 
simple elements, is a creature of sharp, uncerebrated 
processes ; but that the artist, as his race matures, 
combines at length the emotional simplicity of the 
poet with the intellectual fulness of the 
novelist. 

" This general identification between the poet 
and the novelist has been of earlier fruition among 
the French than among ourselves, as in all their 
developments they are, if the word is not offensive, 
more precocious than we. Even in the last century 
almost all the novelists were poets, apart from the 
realistic school of Zola, who himself did not disdain 
to write a novel in bad poetical prose. The names 
extend from the supreme instance of Hugo to Gautier 
and Paul Bourget, Catulle Mendes and Henri de 
Regnier, and a host of lesser men of our own 
days. 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 181 

"It is as interesting to remember that Anatole 
France and Blasco Ibariez began as poets as to 
recollect that Gabriele d'Annunzio remains both. In 
England we had to wait for Meredith and Mr. Hardy 
before we witnessed great novels and great poetry 
achieved by the same men. Their predecessors in 
the novel were definitely, howsoever distinguished, 
prose minds fulfilling prose conceptions. Dickens, 
in his attempts at the poetical sinks into the maudlin, 
Charlotte Bronte into the insignificant ; Thackeray 
is too wise to try. But following upon Meredith 
and Mr. Hardy, intermediately we meet Mr. Kipling, 
Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, then their successors, 
Mr. de la Mare and Mr. Masefield, until at the present 
moment the identity between the poets and novelists 
becomes more and more evident. The names of 
Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, Miss Rose Macaulay, Mr. 
Thomas Moult and Mr. Edward Shanks rise at once 
to the mind and the greatest of his own generation, 
it may well be, in both arts, and in whose hands I 
should most feel the future of the novel to rest, the 
author of ' Sons and Lovers/* America, it is to be 
remarked, is at the beginning of a literature and 
presents among her poets only the names of Mr. 
Anderson and Mr. Cournos as additionally distinguished 
in the sphere of the novel. 

" I do not imagine that the poet-novelist will tend, 
tout simple, to incorporate his own poetry, as such, 
in his novels, though there is no artistic canon to 
prevent him. For the practice indeed would be a 
pretty revival of the traditions established by Sidney 
and Lodge in the Elizabethan novel. But it is 
indubitable that at the least his practice of poetry will 
give him that fastidious command over language 
which is only learned through this ardent and arduous 
discipline ; at the most he will be competent to deal 
with those essential emotions which are common 
* D. H. Lawrence. 



182 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

to all men, but which he, a poet, has the faculty of 
expressing, with an architectonic power and a co- 
ordination of his visions which will be the further 
gift, conferred by the novelist in him, to the great 
synthetic art at which he is labouring/' 



LUCAS MALET" 



" It seems to me that, if the novel is to be worth 
anything, it must reflect the thought and the whole 
tendencies of its own day," remarked Mrs. St. Leger 
Harrison (" Lucas Mallet.") " There are only a few 
stories. We re-tell them perpetually, but we re-tell 
them as modified by immediate social, moral and 
spiritual conditions. 

" I think that there is not sufficient leisure at 
the present time to produce very good literature in the 
form of the novel. But I think that when conditions 
are stabilise4 again, which they must be if civilisation 
is to continue, leisure will return and then we may 
get the literary novel of the past, but it will be literature 
in harmony with the new conditions. 

" Just at present we are tired, both emotionally 
and physically. What the people now want is a form 
of story-telling which will amuse and soothe, and a 
little excite them. Five to ten years will probably 
elapse before any one stream of tendency sufficiently 
declares itself to create a positive school. And until 
then I think we must just have patience with the situa- 
tion, and each writer must work on his own lines 
without bothering. The event will declare itself. 

" There appear to be two distinct strains at present. 

183 



184 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

Firstly, a rather gross realism, and secondly, excursions 
into purely imaginative and romantic regions, 
showing strong spiritual instincts. As an example 
of the latter strain, one may mention Lord Dunsany, 
for whose writing I have a most profound admiration. 
These strains might develop into two very definite 
schools. But one must bear in mind that we are 
not yet out of the wood and that further social and 
economic complications may arise which would have 
a profound influence on every form of art. 

" Meanwhile, the film is certainly exercising a bad 
effect upon much of the popular fiction. Authors 
are writing with one eye on the cinema, in hopes 
of the enormous profits which the cinema alone can 
give. This leads to scamped and crude work, as 
the film is, after all, still in its infancy and is designed 
to appeal at present mainly to the semi-educated 
mind. 

" In the present chaotic state of things it is a very 
hopeful sign for the literature of the future that 
writers of great distinction in stjrte such as Conrad, 
Maurice Hewlett, Edith Wharton, and among the 
younger men, Hugh Walpole, command an increasingly 
large and devoted public." 



H. DE VERE STACPOOLE 



" So much depends on circumstance/' said Mr. De 
Vere Stacpoole. " If, for instance, things go on 
as they are going now in Europe and America, it is 
possible there mayn't be any novels very soon, or 
only those written by Trotsky, but if Europe survives 
herself, the novel will, in my opinion, take on a new 
lease of life, and the novel of character and action 
will look up again — it has been under a long time. 
When was the last alive literary character born ? 
Even historical types like Sherlock Holmes, Captain 
Kettle or Raffles, seem wanting in existence. The 
Hall of Fictional Literature is full of voices but there's 
nothing moving about much in the way of figures, 
either alive or mechanical. There is, of course, 
Mr. Salteena — but he was born a great many years 
ago — I'm awfully sorry, I mean a few years ago. 

" I have also in mind Peter Jackson, cigar merchant. 
Peter is, anyhow, enough alive to make one take an 
interest in him, he moves about a lot and takes you 
with him. Frankau has a tremendous lot of kick 
about him, like Hergesheimer ; he has something 
of an affinity to the man who wrote ' The Pit,' ' The 
Octopus ' and ' Slaughtered.' He is one of the buds, 
I believe, of the new spring that will give us books 

185 



186 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

again of the sort a plain man craves for, books that 
don't strive after literary effects ; books related to 
everyday life, not as it is lived in boudoirs and circles ; 
books that emit stories of little snuffy souls sniffing 
their upward way from school-boy-hood ; books 
with punch in them. 

" Punch brothers, punch with care — what am I 
saying ? — my mind was wandering towards all the 
ticket collectors I will have to face between here and 
Bordighera, and the problems of excess luggage, for 
I have several of the newest books in my luggage 
and they aren't light, and the baggage weighers won't 
deduct a halfpenny, even if I swear there's nothing 
in them*. Why do I take them ? I take them for 
the very same reason that made me buy them — one 
must have something to read. I expect that very 
same reason to keep the libraries going, and it supplies 
an answer to your question, ' Do I think the novel 
form will cease to exist.' No. Unless civilisation 
is destroyed in the next few years — or ever. People 
must have something to read now that they have 
acquired the habit, they do it automatically and 
by the million. It's less like reading than grazing. 
The great herd has found its way into the field of 
Fiction belonging to farmer Mudie and farmer Smith ; 
habit and hunger will keep them there, no matter 
how poor the grass may become — but habit chiefly, 
the habit of automatic feeding. Cattle eat, less from 
hunger than because the sight and smell of herbage 
starts a mental clockwork going which keeps on till 
it runs down." 

* Mr. Stacpoole was just about to leave Europe for the Continent. — Ed. 



BARRY PAIN 



" If you will tell me the novelist of the future," said 
Mr. Barry Pain in the course of an interview, " I will 
tell you what form the novels will take. No one, 
for instance, could have foretold Dickens. Dickens 
was not the product of his age. It would be more 
true to say that the age was a product of Dickens. 
There is a parallel to that in another art — in painting. 
It has already been noticed that the women of the 
eighties tended to resemble the paintings of Rossetti 
and Burne Jones. 

" I do not think that any novelist will deliberately 
look around and see what the popular requirements 
are, and then set himself to meet them. If he did this, 
his lack of sincerity would be obvious and his failure 
would be complete. 

" I do not think we shall see much more of the 'sex 
novel,' as it used to be called. In the nineteenth 
century, which was the century of propriety, most 
novelists were ignoring at least one-third of human 
life. This produced a reaction, with the result that 
we got a minority who dealt with nothing but that 
one-third ; which was unsatisfactory. 

" The novel of the future will be written with much 
greater freedom and also with a better sense of pro- 
is? 

N 



188 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

portion. The sex question will fall into its right 
place and will neither be suppressed nor exaggerated. 

"If commercial considerations affected the novelist 
at all, he would in the future be very careful to limit 
himself to the work expected of him. 

" I think there is a great increase in the taste and 
the intelligence of readers. When people begin to 
read, very crude stuff appeals to them first, but this 
phase does not last. The more people go on reading, 
the more difficult they will be to please, and this, 
of course, is a factor of improvement. 

" I should like to say just a word on obscurity 
in style. We do not hear so much of Thomas Cariyle 
and Robert Browning as we used to do. They 
are to some extent, I think, paying the price for their 
intentional obscurity. Much as I admire the novels 
of Meredith and the later novels of Henry James, 
I am not sure that they will not suffer from the same 
cause. Obscurity is not originality, but it is often 
used to call attention to originality. The only 
pardonable obscurity is that which is inevitable 
from the depth of the thought. It is much more 
difficult and much more valuable to write lucidly 
than to write obscurely. I do not think that we shall 
see much of intentional obscurity in future. . 

" There will probably still be fashions in fiction, 
but they rarely five more than ten years. The lilies 
of the aesthetic eighties are as dead as the green 
carnation of the decadent nineties. 

" Whether romance or realism is to prevail, depends, 
I believe, solely on the writers of both. Any novelist 
who is sufficiently able can choose his subject and 
manner of treatment and even impose them successfully 
upon the reader. 

" Literature is a little bit like the Great War, and 
also a little like the weather. It cannot see more 
than twenty-four hours ahead. During the whole 
course of the Great War. I do not remember that 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 189 

anybody prophesied anything that subsequently hap- 
pened, and I am pretty certain that if I gave a detailed 
and prophetic account of the novel of the future, 
I should subsequently be glad that it was published 
in a daily paper, and so not likely to be remembered."* 

* Note.— This interview was one of those which first appeared in the columns 
of the Pall Mall Gazette.— Ed. 



HUGH WALPOLE 



" A novel seems to me quite simply a business of 
telling a story about certain people whom the writer 
attempts to make as living as possible,' ' said Mr. 
Walpole. 

" Probably behind the lines of these people there 
would be some philosophy of life either stated de- 
finitely or implied in the attitude of the author. 

" It seems to me, therefore, impossible for the 
novel ever to decay or change fundamentally, because 
human beings, so long as the world lasts, will be 
always interested to read about other human beings, 
if they can believe in their existence. It is this be- 
witching readers into believing in the existence of 
people whom they know do not exist that is the 
novelist's business. 

" It does not seem to me to matter by what means 
the writer tries to bring off his spell. He may try 
in the most modern psycho-analytic method or in 
the old eternal story-of-adventure method, or in the 
simple, straight-forward life-as-it-is-lived-day -by-day 
method. Any weapon is permissible if the effect is 
produced. 

" Human beings, for the most part, prefer to be 
encouraged about life, and, therefore, quite naturally, 
the story that offers such encouragement will be the 
more popular story. 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 191 

" Certain readers, however, by much reading and a 
deeper study of life, want truth at all costs, or what 
seems to them to be truth, and something fresh to 
their palate. You will find, therefore, that the 
critic of action, whether professional or not, having 
read an immense amount of novels, generally applauds 
a novel that treats of life from some quite new angle. 
What he wants most from fiction is a point of view, 
the revelation of a personality that has never been 
given to the world before. But if he presses his love 
of novelty too far, he is apt to mistake the medium 
through which the characters are revealed for the 
truth of the characters themselves. 

" And if I were to make any prophesy about the 
future of the novel, I would say that many of us 
are growing tired of this thirst for novelty and are 
turning back with relief to any simple presentment 
of real people in a real way. 

" A good instance of this is the wonderful recrudes- 
cence of Anthony Trollope, who cared nothing about 
form or technique or style, and had, indeed, the 
smallest pretensions of himself as a novelist. But 
he kept his eyes fast fixed on the characters about 
whom he was writing, and tried to tell the truth 
about them as he saw them. He was indeed too 
deeply interested in their adventures to think about 
anything else. 

" And I believe that it is this kind of simplicity 
of interest on the part of the narrator to which we 
will return. I do not mean by that that all the things 
we have learned about the art of the novel in the last 
fifty years will be forgotten. But what we have 
learned from the French, the Russians, Meredith, 
Hardy, Henry James, and the others, must come 
instinctively through our writing and not deliberately 
because we want to acquire some wonderful form or 
technique. 

" I think, too, that we are all growing tired of 



192 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

a meticulous realism which stops at that. And the 
novel of the future will probably permit itself more 
invention, more romance and more imagination. 

" I think that the future of the novel will also 
depend a little upon the amount of encouragement 
that is given to its intelligent development by the 
press. During the last few years literary columns 
in the daily and weekly papers have been largely 
sacrificed to more urgent public affairs. The younger 
and newer writer has, therefore, a very small chance 
of getting his work known. 

. " There seems to me to be a quite new public that 
is very eager for literary direction, and that it would 
be well worth a newspaper's while to pay more atten- 
tion to this new public and to give more space in its 
columns to that new public's needs." 



THOMAS BURKE 



In an interview I recently had with him, Mr. Thomas 
Burke, the celebrated author of " Limehouse Nights," 
" Twinkletoes," and other books, complained that 
the short story, for some reason or other, is never 
taken seriously in England. 

" Possibly the climate may be the cause of this 
curious aversion," said Mr. Burke. " As the English 
people prefer roast beef and a bottle of port to a lighter 
diet, they probably likewise prefer the big, lumbering, 
full-bodied novel of English tradition to the short 
story. On the other hand, in Latin countries and in 
America, where the climate is clear and brisk, the 
short story flourishes. 

" Now, in England, volumes of short stories are 
frowned upon both by publishers and readers. If, 
by any chance, a man makes a success with a volume 
of short stories, his publisher at once turns to him 
with ' Now you must write a novel ! ' 

" When, however, a novelist has made a hit with a 
novel, magazine editors at once call upon him for a 
short story. But why ? An art patron does not go 
to an eminent miniature painter, and say, casually : 
1 Now you might set to work and do me a large canvas 
in oils in the Brangwyn style,' nor, again, does 
he go to a Brangwyn and ask him to do miniatures. 

193 



194 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

" People seem to take it for granted in England 
that a man who can write a novel can ' knock off ' 
a short story in his slack moments. They do not 
seem to- appreciate the fact that a short story is the 
most difficult of all prose forms ; just as the sonnet 
is the most difficult of all poetic forms. 

" Many of the novelists of to-day might have been 
excellent short-story writers ; but, because the short 
story is regarded only as a diversion, they expand 
their short-story ideas into full length novels, — 
and consequently produce bad novels when they might 
have produced excellent short stories. 

"We have to-day more fiction magazines in England 
than ever before ; yet the short story still languishes. 
This is partly the fault of editors who run their maga- 
zines according to their own ideas of what may or 
may not be treated as a work of art. They seem 
to be definitely afraid of originality or the unusual 
in any form. An unknown author who has written 
a truly notable short story has to-day but one door 
open to him — that of the English Review. 

" Before my ' Limehouse Nights ' were published 
in book form, I offered the stories to every popular 
monthly magazine. All refused them. But when 
the stories finally appeared in a book, and had attracted 
attention and discussion, an editor who had refused 
them previously, printed three of them, after publica- 
tion in book form, in face of his earlier declaration 
that ' our public wouldn't stand this sort of thing.' 

" This, I think, speaks for itself." 

Mr. Burke then went on to say that he very much 
more appreciated the attitude of American editors, 
both in regard to their business propositions and also 
in regard to their habit of allowing him a free hand 
in connection with the length of his stories and the 
selection of his material. 

When questioned regarding his method of inspira- 
tion, Mr. Burke replied : " My ideas ' come ' naturally 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL IQ5 
in the form of short stories, and I work on no theory, 
except that the material must agree with the form. 
There must be the single situation moving swiftly 
and cleanly to an inevitable climax. Many possibly 
excellent short stories have been ruined because 
the writers did not know where to stop. 

" To my mind, character is not an essential of a 
good short story ; it is the situation alone that matters. 
Before all, the good short story must be tinct with 
imagination. Hence, in my opinion the greatest 
of all short story writers are Poe, Ambrose Bierce, 
Stephen Crane, " and Joseph Conrad. Of course, 
I know there are others — Russians, Frenchmen, 
and a few Englishmen — but their short stories are 
mostly not short stories at all, but sketches, vignettes, 
or photographic impressions." 



DOUGLAS SLADEN 



" Augustine Birrell once remarked to me," said 
Mr. Sladen in an interview, " that there are three 
things about a novel which signify, namely, the subject, 
the style and the story — and of these the subject is 
the most important. If the theme and the characters 
don't appeal to me, I don't want to read the novel. 
Feeling thus, I always try to fill my books with the 
kind of men and women whom I love to meet, especially 
young people of the vigorous age. In ' Mary Rose,' 
for example, if I may instance a play instead of a novel, 
the characters of the two old gentlemen and the old 
lady who filled two whole scenes, though the acting 
and setting were simply perfection, oppressed me 
because they were the kind of early Victorian people 
from whom I should fly in real life. It is a great 
thing to have one's characters young ; it gives them 
a chance of outgrowing disabilities. 

" Most people think the story the most important 
thing about a novel, and without any doubt it is 
the great story-tellers, like the late Charles Garvice, 
who achieve the most astonishing results in circula- 
tions. As regards style I have only one thing to 
emphasise, and that is that the dialogue and even 

196 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 197 

the soliloquising of the author ought to be in the spoken 
language of ever)/ day, which so often differs from 
the written language. The most life-like stories 
are those which are told as you would tell them if 
you were introducing them into a speech. Hall 
Caine told me that he was in complete agreement 
with this view and said that he regarded me as being 
its pioneer. 

" I once had a very interesting conversation with 
Mrs. Humprhy Ward about failures. I said : ' Why 
do you allow men who are failures to be the centres 
of your novels ? It seems to me to strike a wrong 
note.' She said : ' Mr. Sladen, I am only really 
interested in failures.' This does strike an entirely 
wrong note to me. When I'm writing a novel, I 
seek to introduce my readers by giving the hero the 
biggest obstacles which are not of too morbid a 
nature that occur to me. I like them to seem in- 
superable to the reader, and to make the hero win 
through by sheer grit. But he must make good ; 
his achievements must carry conviction. 

" I am rather fond of reversing the usual order 
of subject in one direction. It is common in novels 
to have a man and woman, starting young and in- 
experienced, and going through various experiences 
to lead up to marriage. I like to have a marriage 
which is a ghastly failure early in the book and to make 
the victims of it get over the consequence of this 
disastrous union to the satisfaction of the reader. 
I think that to have characters who begin with making 
a disastrous marriage and end by getting freed from 
it and being really happily married, is likely to give 
a much stronger love-interest than to have a story 
which leads up to an ordinary cake and bridesmaid 
marriage. 

" Another thing at which I always aim in my novels 
is to give them an important background of some 
sort. In ' A Japanese Marriage ' which was published 



1i 



198 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

long before the relief by legislation of the deceased 
wife's sister, I made this subject the background 
the ordeals of the heroine. The background of 
' Grace Lorraine ' was the institution of a sort 
of college, which was half almshouse, in a restored 
mediaeval abbey where poor musicians, artists and 
authors, who could not have followed their profes- 
sions without such a home, were able to work at 
their writing, reading and composing, until they 
had passed a certain limit of income. 

" You ask me what I think of the future of the 
novel. It seems to depend largely on finance. At 
present, unless the author makes a payment towards 
expenses, publishers will only publish books which 
they consider certain of success, independent of merit. 
They would rather bring out a book by an Ethel M. 
Dell than a book by a George Meredith — if there 
was a George Meredith nowadays. I think we have 
to find some new medium for the publication of novels 
to take the place of the 6s. novel, which has held the 
field for so many years. Advertising may solve the 
question. Harrods or Selfridges may go to a publisher 
and say : ' We require ten novels with editions of 
ten thousand copies each for announcing the attrac- 
tions of our Christmas sales. We do not care whether 
you sell them or give them away.' With this subven- 
tion at his back, a publisher might be willing to bring 
out even another ' Paradise Lost.' To be quite 
serious, some new system of financing the production 
of novels has to be found, if the minor novelist is to 
have a chance again. 

"As to the psychological aspect, one thing is cer- 
tain, namely, that if the rank and file woman goes 
about saying that so and so's novels are psychological, 
so and so's fortune is made. It is on psychology, 
like a chariot of fire, that our Mrs. Barclays rise to 
Olympian heights. 

" I really am against the introduction of psychology 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 199 
into novels, unless it is the sincere portrayal of ex- 
perience. 

" In regard to the genesis of books, my opinion 
is that a book should be the outcome of an idea. 
When an author has finished writing one book, he 
should let his mind lie fallow until some text arises 
on which he feels a burning desire to preach. Having 
found his text, he looks for illustrations of it in every- 
thing which he already knows or can observe. He 
goes on accumulating material and inspirations until 
his imagination helps itself to them and begins to 
create. In my own instance, the accumulation 
period is generally a long one, but when once the 
creation starts, it proceeds rapidly. I was collecting 
material for ' The Curse of the Nile ' for as many 
years as it took months to write. 

M The question of the creative element in art has an 
importance which cannot be exaggerated, although in 
some of the very greatest works it seems, on the surface , 
to be almost non-existent. There is a whole class of 
books which might be called photographic, and some of 
them are among the most treasured heirlooms of our 
literature. But, speaking generally, the immortal 
element in art, the element which made Homer the 
father of literature, is to generalise from the particular 
with convincing verisimilitude. Anyone who can 
achieve this has in him the makings of an immortal. 
But Providence has chosen some strange vessels to 
contain genius, and it sometimes happens that those 
who have this priceless gift so disfigure it by the 
inelegance of their handling that the evidence is lost 
to any eye but the true explorer's. Thus it is said 
that a Walt Whitman is tardily discovered and grudg- 
ingly recognised. And thus it is probable that 
novelists with huge circulations but no literary 
reputation have arrived at their public. 

" You ask me what subjects I prefer for novels. 
In this matter I am a little contrary, for as a reader 



200 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

I like one class of subject, and as a writer another 
class. I like the stories I read and the plays I see 
to be modern of the modern, coming right up to the 
present moment, and I like them to be about just 
the same young men and young women that I take 
most pleasure in meeting in real life. I like to meet 
them in drawing-rooms, at dinner tables, playing 
games, or making excursions. In fact, I like to meet 
them socially. 

" But when I am writing a book I never feel that 
I am giving my readers proper measure unless I give 
them plenty of adventure of one kind or another — 
it may be in military operations, which have a great 
fascination for me — or it may be in the perils which 
attend life among half- civilised and homicidal peoples. 
Or it may be in the perils which attend life in the 
wilds. But somehow I generally feel that my hero 
ought to take risks. 

" I like my heroines to show their grit by rising 
superior to prejudices, as well as by their bravery in 
physical danger. And this leads me to a point. 
One of the great functions of the novel is to educate 
people into overcoming prejudices. We have accepted 
all manner of conventions from our predecessors 
and many of them stand in the way of the ordinary 
happiness of human beings. It is the custom to 
call them safeguards, and to say that if we abandon 
them, the skies — meaning the heavens of morality — 
will fall. 

" I believe nothing of the kind. A man and a 
woman, married to each other ought, above all, to 
be fair and generous, behaving, as the saying is, 
like a white man to each other, but if they have made 
a mistake in marrying and can only be unhappy, 
the best thing that they can do is to get out of it as 
quickly as possible. The greatest reason of all for 
divorce is incompatability of disposition — inability 
to be happy together. Marriage should be dissoluble 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 201 

like any other contract. Make the conditions about 
alimony, and the custody of the children strict. 
When marriage is dissoluble by the consent of both 
parties, such matters are likely to be equitably 
arranged. I understand that the very liberal Scan- 
dinavian divorce laws have worked well in this respect, 
and that Mohammedans are more chary than others 
about divorce, because their alimony regulations are 
so oppressive. 

" I have one thing to add, viz. : that what I have 
preached in my novels on this subject I have practised 
in real life. I have never had occasion to use the 
safety-valve of the divorce courts myself ; but I have 
more than once recommended its use to my dearest 
friends, and on each occasion with the best results. 
As one of the greatest preachers of our day has said, 
the incompatability of one is sufficient." 






SARAH GRAND 



Madame Sarah Grand is now living in a beautiful 
and spacious house in Bath, called Crowe Hall, sur- 
rounded by a garden designed on the Italian plan with 
smooth level lawns bounded by stone balustrades. 
In the tranquil atmosphere of this delightful abode 
she wishes to end her days. 

I was impressed by her keen mentality and her 
passionate sympathy with large and universal ideas, 
her wide compassion and understanding of human 
nature, and her quick response to the things that 
really matter, both in life and in art. 

Here, one felt, was a woman who had looked life 
steadily in the face ; a woman who had refused to be 
hypnotised by convention or deceived by appearances ; 
a woman of noble impulses and lofty aspirations 
who had gladly given of her best to the world, unde- 
terred by censure and unspoilt by praise. 

And I do not think there are many writers alive 
at the present day of whom the same can be said. 

When I asked Madame Grand to give me her opinions 
on the future of the novel, she replied as follows : — 

" I should say that at present it is not possible to 
foresee the future of the novel ; it depends on so many 
other factors about which there is no certainty ; but 
considering the part played by this branch of literature 

202 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 203 

in human affairs the question is one of extraordinary 
interest and of great importance. 

"It is important because, whether he will or no, 
the novelist is a teacher ; his influence is formative, 
for good or for evil. If no two people can converse 
together for half an hour intimately without one 
of them having influenced the other in some sort, 
what must be the influence of the novelist in whose 
ideas readers are steeping themselves everywhere, in 
every class ! 

" Genius in fiction wields a power which is greater 
than that of priest, philosopher, or scientist, because 
more comprehensive and further reaching. Priest, 
philosopher, and scientist are bound to be sectional ; 
they are scientists, and specialisation limits their 
appeal. The great novelist, on the contrary, is bound 
to be universal ; his subject is human nature, and its 
possibilities, mental, moral, and physical. He shows 
the life of his time as it is lived ; he shows it as it 
might be lived, though not necessarily as it should 
be lived. He may use his power benevolently, to 
elevate, or he may use it malignly, to degrade. He 
may be either destructive or constructive, and he 
may be both at once, a destroyer of what is good or 
bad, and a reconstructor for better or worse. His 
use of his power depends on his own predilections, 
his appreciation of values, his sense of right and wrong. 
The truer his sense of ethical values the more extensive 
his influence and the greater his fame. For man 
has a sense of himself as still in the making, a sense 
that his growth depends on the cultivation of his 
better self, his highest attributes, and all the world 
over he honours the effort to help him. 

" As civilisation advances man becomes more and 
more self-conscious, more and more aware of his own 
complexity, of a lower nature that debases, and of a 
higher nature that exalts. Body, mind and spirit 
he is, and body and mind are corruptible ; but spirit 



20 4 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

is incorruptible, and not to be defrauded of its rights 
without a struggle, let him deny it as he may. His 
pampered body itself is prone to become the ally 
of his spirit. Its satisfaction ends in satiety, and, 
revolting against his every effort to stimulate its 
sensual appetites, it makes him aware of a craving, 
of an insensate hungering for something, something 
indefinite because he cannot or will not recognise 
its source, but all the more tormenting on that account. 
It is in vain that the novelist offers his wares to this 
miserable man in his hundreds of thousands, when 
his wares have nothing in them but the life he is sick 
of, labelled ' real life.' Deep down in himself the 
sufferer knows that the label lies ; that what is here 
offered him is not real life but only the passing show 
He is vaguely conscious of what is ' Beyond these 
voices,' of a real life somewhere, somehow to be 
attained, a life that grows ever more beautiful the 
longer it is lived. A man who is ripe for the Divine 
adventure is like a migrant bird, restless, unhappy 
as the time for flight approaches. He needs neither 
map nor compass, only the call. When the call 
comes he is up and away, in full faith, divinely guided. 

" But for men there is the making ready, the 
ripening time. It is then that his soul sickens of 
the passing show, that the important craving sets 
in ; the soul's hunger for the bread of life, the spirit's 
yearning to penetrate the mists that veil the goal. 

" The future of the novel depends upon the novelist's 
response to this universal craving, his comprehension 
of it, the extent to which he experiences it himself, 
and his attitude towards it, whether he is for satisfying 
it, or for quenching it. Genius full grown is sym- 
pathetic insight made perfect ; but genius is not 
implanted in any mere man full-grown. It is, to 
begin with, but a tender seedling which has to be 
nurtured, and upon its nurture depends its quality, 
whether it shall develop into a poisonous growth, 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 205 
or whether it shall be rich in soul-sustenance. For 
there is an evil genius as well as a good, a genius 
which degrades and defiles as well as a genius which 
raises and purifies. 

" The history of mankind is the history of the 
struggle between these two principles, good and evil, 
or God and Devil, if you will. To the average man 
Civilisation and Barbarism stand for the contending 
forces. When he calls the result ' the march of 
civilisation ' he means progress from a lower stage of 
development to a higher. In every age what little 
progress has been made has been determined by 
ethical values. 

" The greatest novelists of the immediate past, 
the few who have made a lasting impression, were 
clear and right in their estimate of ethical values. 
They neither juggled nor paltered with principles. 
Their treatment of the Eternal Verities of Right and 
Wrong was simple, straightforward, courageous and 
uncompromising. They were on the side of the angels. 
Tried, as in justice they should be, by the standards 
of their day, they come out above them, as reformers. 
They had a high sense of responsibility, of the weight 
of words, of the effect of familiarising the mind with 
what is ugly in thought, word, and deed. Familiarity 
breeds tolerance rather than contempt, and they 
avoided the danger. The sense in which they were 
limited is not the sense which would have limited 
their appeal. Their appeal was universal, because, 
whatever their faults, their work had in it that Essential 
Something which eases ' the true heart's seraph 
yearning for better things,' the craving which is a 
sign of spiritual growth. Because they were on the 
side of the angels, they moved multitudes. 

" Progress is marked by refinements, and the 
reaction of the 19th century novelist against the gross- 
ness of his predecessors was a striking advance. 
Refinement of feeling put him into possession of the 



206 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

finer insight which is a concomitant of fine feelings , 
and he eschewed brutality as but a blundering kind 
of strength. As in the objective, so in the subjective 
world, ugliness was ugly in his sight, and beauty was 
beautiful. He avoided the one no more than the 
other when it was inherent in his subject, and he 
presented the contrast, but not in repulsive details. 
He dealt in broad effects, without offence, yet potent 
to impress. 

" This man was of necessity the product of the 
national spirit of his time, but he was not merely 
a mirror reflecting the facts of life as it was then lived. 
If he did not succeed, as later generations have suc- 
ceeded, in tracing causes to their effects, he at all 
events made this attempt and is to be honoured 
as a pioneer. He probably never defined it, but in 
his judgment of values truth of idea was more im- 
portant to him than accuracy of fact. Hence, he was 
interpreter as well as recorder. He interpreted the 
signs of the times, diagnosed social diseases, taught 
and prescribed, making many mistakes, no doubt, 
but in all sincerity honestly doing his best. 

" What immediately strikes one in considering the 
part played by the novel in modern life is the loss of 
power in the individual novelist. He no longer stands 
out like his predecessor above the crowd, a personality 
to be reckoned with among the forces that influence 
opinion, inspire thought, and mould character. All 
these things no doubt novelists still attempt, but they 
succeed only in a small way. There is not one novelist 
to-day whose work is known to the whole reading 
public as the work of the great 19th century novelists 
was known in their day ; not one with whose characters 
everybody is acquainted ; not one whose next book 
is eagerly expected and treated on its appearance 
as an event second to none in interest if not in im- 
portance. The modern man moves coteries ; his 
predecessor moved the world. 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 207 

" Yet the novel has not ceased to be a power in 
the land. Never were there so many writers of novels 
and never so many readers, and all these writers are 
influencing their readers in some sort. But to what 
purpose ? What is the general tendency ? Is there 
a general tendency nowadays ? There is, and it is 
not elevating. The crying need of these days is 
for consolation. One may read a hundred modern 
novels and not find a word of comfort in any of them, 
not a scintilla of spiritual uplift. The cleverest 
modern novelists cater principally for the sensual 
side of human nature ; they have little or no con- 
ception of our spiritual needs. They are small in 
the all-important particular in which the 19th century 
men were great. They responded to the eternal, 
universal craving of the higher side of human nature 
for sustenance ; in this respect their attitude was 
determined. In this respect the attitude of the 
modern man, when he responds at all, is indeterminate ; 
he vacillates. Tastes differ and he caters for all tastes, 
but he does not thread his beads ; he has no cord to 
thread them on. He is episodical, sectional, frag- 
mentary, and so of necessity is his appeal. The 
medium of the novelist disposes him to be sectional, 
but it does not limit his outlook. However small 
his section, there is nothing to prevent his looking up 
out of it and beyond ; nothing to prevent his appre- 
ciating the whole vast design of life and shaping 
his fragment so that it fits into it and adds to its 
beauty. No doubt attempts are being made sporadi- 
cally to minister to the importunate spiritual needs 
of our day, but not as a rule by the strongest writers. 
Still, it is significant that these attempts, though 
they fail in literary merit, have the widest appeal ; 
the cultivated approve them as much as the ignorant. 

" To know the Eternal Verities for what they are 
is the crown of perception, the sceptre of genius. 
The novelist whose spiritual vision is obscured must 



208 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

be wrong in his values, and in so far as his values are 
incorrect, in so far does he fall short of the glory, 
the glory of the lamp-tender, of the torch-bearer. 
His strength, when he is strong, debases instead of 
elavatmg, corrupts instead of purifying, blasts and 
disintegrates instead of constructing, adorning and 
solidifying. The perversity of talent makes for 
pettiness ; the perversity of genius makes for des- 
truction. 

" As to the future of the novel ; will there be another 
dominant genius or will there not ? Who can say ? 
But if or when he appears, one thing is certain. Our 
modern civilisation is trembling in the balance, and 
the weight of a novelist of great genius would turn 
the scale. With what effect depends on whether he 
throws his weight in on the side of the angels or whether 
he repairs to the other camp." 



FERGUS HUME 



Mr. Fergus Hume wrote as follows : — 

" I think we can divide novels into three classes ; 
those, dealing with the world as it was ; those having 
to do with the world as it is ; those conjecturing 
what the world will be. So far as the first and second 
classes are concerned, it is tolerably certain — the 
material being to hand — what will be written. The 
third class, being Utopian, depends upon the prevision, 
correct, or incorrect of the author, or his imaginative 
skill to invent futurity, good or bad according to his 
ideals. The first and second class deals with things 
in the past or present which we know from actual life 
or study of books ; but the third class — who can tell 
what kind of novel will figure in it ? 

" To my mind, no one can tell, as we are yet 
ignorant what form the civilisation which is now being 
born will take. No person, say, at the court of 
Louis IV. could possibly have forecast the civilisa- 
tion of the 19th century, and so could scarcely have 
written a plausible story thereon. The cataclysm 
which gave birth to the epoch which ended August, 
1914, began with the American War of Independence, 
and its actual fighting ended with the Battle of Water- 
loo in 1815. The world then went into the melting 

209 



210 THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 

pot over a very hot fire, and who can tell in what 
shape we will emerge therefrom. And as the novel 
of the future will deal with its present when it arrives, 
how can anyone say what it will portray ? There 
will always be the novel of romance, of adventure ; 
detective tales and problem stories ; also, the novel 
with a moral, and religious fiction. And always 
there will be the central motive of love, which makes 
the world go round. But the surroundings, the 
ideas, the treatment, the descriptions, will be wholly 
new and of a kind which we can scarcely imagine at 
present, environed, as we are, by our own more crude 
conditions. 

" After the termination of the active struggle in 
1815, it was fifteen to twenty years before the railways 
began the new era ; that wonderful 19th century 
which ended in 1914. It will probably be ten or 
fifteen years, if not more, before the aeroplanes 
will inaugurate the coming epoch. Humanity only 
moves to the splendid goal, at which it will ultimately 
arrive, by means of these gigantic cataclysms ; they 
have always been, they always will be, until the design 
of our Evolution is completed. Every era grows 
old and weary, and it is necessary that its ideas — 
upon which its form of civilisation depends — should 
be reshaped for the betterment of the world. Just 
now religions, science, politics, education — everything, 
as we know— are being jumbled up and tumbled 
about so that out of the old material new forms 
and better may be shaped. But who can say what 
that shape will be ? We grow into each new epoch, 
slowly experimenting with many men, many ideas ; 
shaping things this way and that, until the world 
arrives at a tolerably satisfactory civilisation. 

" This being so, since a novel deals with humanity, 
its surroundings and the thoughts, words and deeds 
suggested by those surroundings, I cannot see — 
these being wholly new and beyond the grasp of our 



THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL 211 

finite brains — how anyone can suggest what the novel 
of the future will be. Personally, I fancy it will 
deal with psychic things, more or less, as humanity 
is now beginning to sense the invisible. But, to 
my mind, it is impossible to say more. To imagine 
this and that concerning future fiction is about as 
profitable as weaving ropes of sand. But, of course, 
this is merely my own idea, based on the grounds 
I have set forth above. Others may, and probably 
will, think differently." 



THE END. 



ALPHABETICAL LIST OF AUTHORS 



ALPHABETICAL LIST OF AUTHORS 





PAGE 


Atherton, Gertrude 


..114 


Benson, E. F 


..153 


Beresford, J. D 


. . 109 


Borley, G. Colby 


..163 


Bowen, Marjorie 


. . 77 


Burke, Thomas 


..193 


Calthrop, Dion Clayton 


.. .. 138 


Casserly, Gordon 


..157 


Chesson, W. H 


17, 70 


Creighton, Basil 


..9' 


Cournos, John 


.. 1' 


Crespigny, Mrs. Champion de . . 





Delcarol, Marwin 



ALPHABETICAL LIST OF AUTHORS 





PAGE 


Atherton, Gertrude 


..114 


Benson, E. F. 


..153 


Beresford, J. D 


. . IO9 


Borley, G. Colby 


..163 


Bowen, Marjorie 


-77 


Burke, Thomas 


..193 


Calthrop, Dion Clayton 


.. .. 138 


Casserly, Gordon 


..157 


Chesson, W. H 


17* 70 


Creighton, Basil 


..95 


Cournos, John 


. . 160 


Crespigny, Mrs. Champion de . . 


..55 



Delcarol, Marwin 



170 



CCXVI 



ALPHABETICAL LIST OF AUTHORS 



Farnol, Jeffery .. 
Frankau, Gilbert . . 



PAGE 

- 155 

. 112 



George, W. L. 
Golding, Louis 
Grand, Sarah 



40 
179 
202 



Hewlett, Maurice 
Hichens, Robert 
Holme, Constance 
Hope, Anthony 
Hume, Fergus 



29 

39 
102 
100 
209 



Kaye-Smith, Sheila 
Kenealy, Dr. Arabella 
Kennedy, Bart 



74 
52 

92 



Locke, William J. 
Lowndes, Mrs. Belloc 
Ludovici, Anthony M. 



32 
62 
46 



" Malet, Lucas " 

Mansfield, Charlotte, F.R.G.S. 

Mason, A. E. W 

Maxwell, W. B 



183 

172 

49 
106 



ALPHABETICAL LIST OF AUTHORS 


ccxvn 






PAGE 


Norris, W. E. 


. . . . 


.. 141 


Noyes, Alfred 





•• 34 


Page, Gertrude 




.. 85 


Pain, Barry 




.. 187 


Pemberton, Max . . 




.. 80 


Perrin, Alice 




.. 119 


Peterson, Margaret 




. . 126 


Phillpotts, Eden . . 




.. 99 


Pugh, Edwin 




.. 167 


Reynolds, Mrs. Baillie- . 




.. 67 


Rhodes, Kathlyn . . 


. . . . 


.. 115 


Richardson, Dorothy 





.. 90 


Sabatini, Rafael . . 




.. 60 


Scott, Mrs. Dawson- 




. . 122 


Sidgwick, Mrs. Alfred . 




.. 147 


SlLBERRAD, UNA L. . . 




.. 144 


Sinclair, May 




.. S 7 


Sinclair, Upton 




•• 73 


Sladen, Douglas . . 




. . 196 


Soutar, Andrew . . 




•• 134 


Stacpoole, H. de Vere . 




.. 185 


Starr, Meredith . . 




xii., 27 


Straus, Ralph 




.. 128 


Swinnerton, Frank 




-. 43 



CCXVIII ALPHABETICAL LIST OF AUTHORS 

PAGE 

Thurston, E. Temple 150 

Trent, Paul 131 



Walpole, Hugh 190 

Waugh, Alec 83 

Wylie, I. A. R 124 



Young, F. Brett 175 



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IECKMAN 

NDERY INC. 

JAN 89 



N. MANCHESTER, 

INDIANA ACQP.? 



